Fences in the Countryside

L Photograph by courtesy Dunedin City Council. Aerial photogrammetric mapping • Large scale photo enlargements • Mosaics • Ground control surveys AERO SURVEYS New Zealand)LTD. P.O. Box 444 Tauranga Telephone 88-166 Number 46 Jvin Jig 7 March 1977 Editorial 4 A sense of direction Robert Riddell 5 Letter from Britain: The Community Land Act G.W.A. Bush 6 Local government & urban development Richard Thompson 15 The second transport study: A review reviewed John Chivers 18 Fences in the countryside Rosemary Barrington 24 Multi unit housing in Calgary R.V. Welch 30 Planning conflicts within tourist centres: A comment Robert Riddell 33 Letter from Britain; Development Control Morris Taylor 35 Book Review Peter Horsley 36 Casebook Town Planning Quarterly is the official journal of the New Address all correspondence to the Editor: Town Zealand Planning Institute Incorporated, P.O. Box 6388 Planning Quarterly, P.O.Box 8789, Symonds Street, Auckland Auckland 1. Telephone/Telegrams: 74-740 Editor: J.R. Dart Technical Editor: M.H.Pritchard Department of Town Planning, University of Auckland Annual Subscription: $5.00 (New Zealand and Australia) Design: David Reynolds post free, elsewhere $NZ6.00 Cover Photograph : Jim Dart The Institute does not accept responsibility for statements Printed by made or opinions expressed in this Journal unless this Acme Printing Works Ltd, responsibility is expressly acknowledged. 137 Great North Road, Published March, June, September, December. Auckland. Town Planning Quarterly 46 —3 But exporting industry means cities and we fret at the way in which people move from small towns to big towns and the way in which the most industry and the most people seem to congregate together. ECKorial We fret, too, at the way in which our balance of payments never seems quite to, and never weighs in our favour. A sense of direction We fret that, in spite of all our efforts, a gap between Raymond Williams, in his scholarly study, Culture and the poor and the rich is widening. The continued existence Society, 1780-1950, remarked of R.H. Tawney, that he was, of the poor irritates and annoys; it taints the pleasure that "one of the noblest men of his generation". True or not, his we get from our possessions. In our more self-critical mo- two essays, The Acquisitive Society (1921) and Equality ments, we may even entertain the thought that the gap is (1931) are as pertinent today as they were when they were increasing because the rich are acquiring ever greater written half-a-century ago. wealth. Perhaps we are being just a little too self-indulgent It was in the former book that Tawney opened with the with our two houses and two cars, caravan and motorboat, observation that: swimming pool and sauna. But the act of acquisition pro- It is a commonplace that the characteristic virtue of En- vides a stimulus which sustains until next year's model ar- glishmen is their power of sustained practical activity, and rives to begin the cycle again. Self-constraint needs a their characteristic vice a reluctance to test the quality of philosophy to nurture it, to offer an alternative to the con- that activity by reference to principles. They are incurious sumer society. as to theory, take fundamentals for granted, and are more Bertrand Russell had a poetic ending to his Proposed interested in the state of the roads than in their place on the Roads to Freedom (1919). map. And it might fairly be argued that in ordinary times The world that we must seek is a world in which the that combination of intellectual tameness with practical creative spirit is alive, in which life is an adventure full of joy energy is sufficiently serviceable to explain, if not to justify, and hope, based rather upon the impulse to construct that the equanimity with which its possessors bear the criticism upon the desire to retain what we possess or to seize what of more mentally adventurous nations. It is the mood of is possessed by others. It must be a world in which affec- those who have made their bargain with fate and are con- tion has free play, in which love is purged of the instinct for tent to take what it offers without re-opening the deal. It domination, in which cruelty and envy have been dispelled leaves the mind free to concentrate undisturbed upon pro- by happiness and the unfettered development of all the fitable activities, because it is not distracted by a taste for instincts that build up life and fill it with mental delights. unprofitable speculations. Most generations, it might be Such a world is possible; it waits only for men to wish to said, walk in a path which they neither make nor discover, create it. but accept; the main thing is that they should march. The Last December, the report of the task force on economic blinkers worn by Englishmen enable them to trot all the and social planning, New Zealand at the Turning Point, ap- more steadily along the beaten road, without being dis- peared amidst brief publicity and some embarrassment. turbed by curiosity as to their destination. Like Tawney's Englishmen, we are not accustomed to lift- He could as well have been writing of New Zealanders. ing our eyes. In any case, the report was too reminiscent of As a nation, we have been content to keep moving with- the National Development Council of a decade earlier and out being overly concerned about either direction or con- we all know what that achieved. Sir Frank Holmes' little sequence. band will, inevitably, chase the scent of regional develop- We descended, as efficient as any locust plague, upon ment and they will conclude that what we need are more the forests; devoured everything in our path; axed and corporate regional authorities and they will find a placebo burnt, logged and crushed; consuming timber as fast, as to divert the remnants of the Wellington centralist lobby. frantically, as wastefully, as any exploitative group of 'free They will not be so politically naive as to believe that they enterprise', `get-rich-quick-boys', 'why should we worry will have much influence on Parliament Hill, pragmatists to about the future, whatever did it do for us?' people the a man (and woman) and not a futurist in sight. No harm whole Western world over. would be done, then, if they were to look beyond the politi- In place of the wonderful diversity of indigenous, sub- cians and seek to fire our imaginations with utopian vis- tropical forest, we planted English grasses; covering the ions. hills and valleys with carpets, holed and frayed with ero- They could always reassure themselves by quoting Oscar sion, but green in winter and golden brown in summer. We Wilde's dictum: stocked them with sheep and cows to clothe and feed our- a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not selves and any in the world who could afford the luxuries of even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at meat and butter and wool. which humanity is always landing... Given the pressures of world population and the rush to For New Zealand, and the world, are at a turning *point affluence, the exchange was inevitable and if we were more and we could make a virtue out of necessity. ruthless than we needed to have been, we were less so than The planning profession could help if it could learn to we could have been. abandon the narcissism of introversion and give more of its Then we sought to plant and cultivate industry as assidu- collective time to the community. It, at least, should be em- ously as we did grass and with the same end in mind: to phasising that trend is not destiny; that the future does hold meet our own modestneeds and then to export. It seems a alternatives. But we cannot change only one thing and little strange that we should seek to compete with the mas- leave the rest constant; we cannot change the physical en- sed factories of Japan and Europe and the USA, but we vironment without changing also the economic and social must export in order to import and we have to export quite environment. Such statements of the obvious need con- a lot in order to be able to bring in such important items as tinuous re-statement. Rolls Royce and Mercedes cars, air-conditioning units and Let us hope that the silence of the planning profession on wastemasters, 450 hp outboard motors and electric tooth- such matters is the silence of contemplation and not the brushes. silence of those who have nothing to say. J.R. Dart 4 -Town Planning Quarterly 46 Letter from Britain. were the 1947 Act still in use, would have removed most of the bureaucratic costs, development delays The Community Land Act and unfair allocation of development benefits so Robert Riddell. apparent today. But this point is academic. The Tories will, in all probability, tinker with the corporation, land and development gains tax instruments, but in a way which will keep the total The Community Land Act 1975 is a very political tax haul below an 80% threshold. Future Labour piece of legislation. It represents the third attempt by administrations might well give up their claim that all the Labour Party in Britain to draw a large proportion land development gains should come into public of the windfall gains from land use allocation coffers and we might enter a period of greater decisions into public coffers — the two repealed legislative stability where the principal statute precedents to the Community Land Act being the remains intact and only the tax threshold is chopped well-known Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and changed — hardly an ideal administrative which was designed to expropriate all development solution, but a common political compromise in this value to the state, and the relatively less happy Land country.

Load more