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Suburban Wasteland

Waste is the most prominent feature of N.Z.'s present suburban and sub divisional planning, according to town planner Fritz Bergman. Speaking to a meeting in the Union last week, he cited the inefficiency of Auckland which has a population of 650,000 in the same space that Greater London fits eleven million. Not that Mr Bergman wants to see Greater London reproduced in N.Z., rather he wished to see suburban planning that creates more varied housing and utilises available land more effectively.

At present N.Z. has only one form of subdivisional planning which results in evenly spaced houses all set back the same distance from the road. With rigid street patterns as well, the result is the infamous 'little boxes' such as in Porirua.

The Sub divisional pattern is the same for big and small towns throughout N.Z., because by-laws are more or less standard. In Wellington city the minimum section size is 16 perches, rising to 24 perches in a suburb such as Tawa, and 32 perches in a country town.

The average frontage of a N.Z. city suburb section, is 50-60 feet and the length between 120 and 180 feet. Further by-laws demand that the house is set 20 feet down the section, that there is a 5' - 10' space on both sides of the house and a backyard as well, the house itself must cover no more than 30% of the site. Inevitably then, the house is set in the middle of the section, running front to back, surrounded by quite a bit of land, forcing everyone to be a gardener. Not everyone in suburbia feels like gardening, so that quite a few sites present an unkempt, appearance, creating the sub-urban slum.

Privacy is often cited as the reason for so completely isolating each house from its neighbour. N.Z. house design, however, is orientated outwards, so that each neighbour can see into the next house necessitating the use of blinds and curtains to ensure privacy. Also, the suburban road is 60 feet wide, which means that each facing house is separated by at least a hundred feet. This road width is only utilised for a few peak hours a day and is a further example of land waste. The building of isolated but not necessarily private houses, coupled with a roadpolicy that creates isolated little blocks, must be a major factor in the loneliness so often associated with suburban life.

There are however alternatives to this pattern, one of which is to have three or four houses clustered around a service yard. The houses need be no closer than they would be with the five foot side yard. This scheme fits three or four houses on the same area of land normally occupied by one, so curtailing, to some extent, the suburban sprawl. In Christchurch there is the town house scheme, which is much the same as above, except that some of the houses are actually joined. It would be possible in an individual house to have either, a courtyard area in the middle of the house, or on the side, again taking up less land at present.

Mr Bergman feels that the regulations dictate the kind of houses we have in the suburbs, and local councils if they wanted to, could change the regulations. He wants to see a greater range of choice in the type of housing possible in the suburbs, to help alleviate the uniform drabness of suburbia.