The Art of Town Planning

Jim Dart

Of Course, town planning is not an art; nor would the most bigoted claim it to be a science. Its place is in that wide expanse that lies between the two poles of human intelligence. Town planning is seldom concerned with the planning of towns either; tempting indeed as is that particular field experiment—as spectacular on the positive side as the field experiments of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were on the negative.

Towns are not quite as easy to discard as other prototypes should the design turn out to be a faulty one. New towns also require a considerable capital outlay and even more moral courage, mixed with the confidence of the "I know best" variety. These prerequisites make it unlikely that many towns will be "planned" in New Zealand with the next decade or so. In any case, there are quite enough problems within our existing towns to keep most of those concerned gainfully employed during the Interim.

We are a nation of modest people, but a well-adjusted one. There is no need for the analyst's couch to help us to recognise and admit our limitations. Planning problems in the Capital? Call in the Overseas Expert. Hardening of the Capital's traffic arteries? Puzzled as to how to add that extension to Parliament Buildings? Too many baches and too much broken amber-coloured glass at our beaches? The Overseas Expert is our man.

The problems are familiar enough and the range of alternative solutions often long-since clearly charted. It is because they are not acceptable solutions that the Expert is brought in. His task is to find some novel way—preferably of the magic wand variety—of getting over the particular difficulty. Unfortunately, fairy godmothers are rather rare these days and the confirmatory report is discreetly filed away with others of like kind that have marked the passing of the political generations.

Substitute the phrase "town design" for that of "town planning" and the approach, for the layman, begins to make sense. If town planning could be identified here with the planning of other people's land, then town design could be thought of as the planning of one's own land. The difference is a fundamental one, a difference of kind and not degree. Sadly, failure to appreciate this has led to many misunderstandings and much mis-direction of energy devoted to exercises intended as constructive criticism.

Where the land is owned by the planning agency the problem is akin to the interior decoration of one's own house; the degree of success will vary with the skill of the designer and the available budget, hut the task will be immeasurably more difficult, or even impossible, where the proportions and orientation of the house and its rooms are bad.

So it is with town design. The shape, the form, the composition of grouped buildings, rests with the skills of the architects and the terms of reference set for them. If the site is too cramped, the reading pattern too chaotic to hold and serve the finished buildings, the problem will be beyond the ingenuity of even the most imaginative to produce a successful result. The final composition will be a minor variation upon the popular theme of Galbraith's "private wealth and public squalor".

Where the skill of the architect is not of the highest, the result is sad Indeed and two examples from Wellington will suffice to make the point. The administrative block for the City Council is tacked on to an existing Town Hall and at the base of a small and sharply-apexed triangle. The open space that lies at its foot is popular in spite of, rather than because of, any civic amenity that it offers. It is carefully framed by trolleybus poles and wires; it is mown by winds; it is cross-quilted with pansy beds and its few trees are carefully selected to enjoy a brief and stunted growth amidst the salt-laden breezes. Any noticeable link between it and the Public Library is entirely accidental and its early 1930s architectural style, constructed in the early 1950s. happily ignores all that had been conceived in the art and technique of building during the intervening period.

The second example is that national disgrace the new Cathedral in Molesworth Street. It is not a public building in quite the same sense of the Town Hall complex and therefore it would have been most difficult to argue that ratepayers or taxpayers should have been asked to ensure that the site and the surrounding spaces and uses would be in keeping with such a monument to the Anglican religion. Perhaps, in any case, it is only the secular who can look at it with any pretence at objectivity, but many generations of the community will be forced to live with it and that will be at least as difficult as with some of the buildings lately appearing in the precincts of such as Featherston Street. It is perhaps, appropriate that the Cathedral's pink form should be shadowed by the commercial bulk to its north and it does at least demonstrate that vandalism is not the prerogative of the young and irreligious.

If these are some of the results to date of what has been done in the name of significant sections of the public, now much more difficult ft is to guide the development and redevelopment of the countless plots of land in individual ownership. Again, the analogy of the house may serve to illustrate the point. All house owners will be interested in what is going up on the site next door. If they are sufficiently conscious of their surroundings they will properly suggest that it should be a structure that will be put to a use compatible with a residential locality. With equal propriety, they will suggest that it be structurally sound and not too close to the boundary for fear of fire hazards and the like; that the bulk of the building should not be so great as to destroy all sense of privacy, to shield any glimpse of the sun; for the sake of physical and mental health. Should these suggestions be met with indifference or hostility, an arbiter will be sought and the differing attitudes reconciled. It is when an attempt is made to extend this group of suggestions to another concerned with matters of taste that the difference between freedom and licence becomes defined. It would not be proper to suggest that the wall should be of this precise dimension, that the windows should be spaced so, and the colour of the building, thus. That is not to say that comment of this-kind should not be offered if the opportunity arises. It is possible that the new owner may even be flattered by such a degree of Interest, but, in our current social climate, it will be more usually interpreted as being an intolerable impertinence.

I appreciate that the point is a laboured one, but the moral is important when extended to our total urban and rural environment. We can, as a community, achieve the degree of guidance and control that we want only to the extent that we are prepared to surrender our personal freedom of choice. If we set a high value on this personal freedom, then we must accept that the sum will be capable of producing as many permutations of environmental pattern as there are owners of property.

At this stage in arguments of this kind, the custom is to compare the USA with Russia as marking the two extremes of the scale. This is a wonderful device because, once having attached the labels, the problem appears in the beautifully simple contrast of black and white, (or white and black depending on one's political view-point) and thought-processes only again grind into motion when it is Irritatingly pointed out that there are intervening shades of grey.

New Zealand's periodic movement to and fro along this broad band of grey according to the stimulus of the moment, would be more rational and to greater purpose were we able to avoid entirely the childish temptation to emotive metaphoric description. Let us attempt the best of all worlds and, at the least, occasionally nibble at the cake that is ours. To pursue the analogy then to the point of tediousness, the best way to ensure that the house next door will conform to one's own sense of that which is appropriate, is to build it oneself and then to sell or lease it. Thus, we are brought full circle—town planning can only be synonymous with town design when property is held in community ownership. For example, it is only when Queen Street properties are publicly owned that talk and argument over comprehensive redevelopment can be anything more than an academic exercise and with each twelve inches of land fronting that noble half mile valued at £3000, it will be a year or two yet before there is added any greater air of realism. This is why the Auckland Harbour Board's proposals for the 13 acres at the foot of Queen Street is so significant. The Board owns the land and has the courage and enterprise to take advantage of the fact. It is here that the community interest and energy should be focussed for, in construction work of this scale, the most important dimension of all is the fourth.

The work that so far has fallen without the province of local government town planners has been much more prosaic. Not for them the glamour of spectacular building programmes, but the seemingly more modest concern for the control and guidance of the use of other people's land and buildings to ensure a compatability of functions. Some, including our friend the Overseas Expert, who in the process, page 7 merely demonstrates that his own particular brand of expertise does not travel too well, describes this as "negative planning." But it is negative only in the sense that, often, it is not Immediately obvious. A refusal to permit a joinery factory to be built in a residential area; to allow shops at a dangerous street intersection; a service station fronting a scenic drive; this kind of action occurs dally throughout the country with, frequently, only the participants being aware of what has happened. Where this type of development does exist, it is the result of either the Inadequacy of earlier town planning legislation or a reluctance to use it. Little imagination is required to visualise what chaos there would now be if those earlier failures had been allowed to be repeated.

Perhaps you have noticed that, generally, the only advertising hoardings in country areas now are those that are on railway land. You may credit the various County authorities for their absence and note that Crown land, in this respect is beyond local government control. It is to be hoped that the Minister for Railways, in his Insatiable search for advertising revenue, does not see the current fashion in Auckland Transport Board buses. To my mind, this absence of hoardings along our rural roads is as much 'positive planning' as the designing of a group of civic buildings. It is an example of that planning which is neither art nor science and the comprehensiveness of which goes no further than the willingness of our society to sacrifice its rights as individuals.

At the risk of setting in train a whole series of conditioned reflex actions, the greatest step forward, however, will be made when the formidable task of the public acquisition of significant areas of land is given serious consideration.