Sleepytown – Are new towns the solution

Sleepyhead, the iconic NZ bed maker is changing ahead with a plan change in Ohinewai, a blink and you miss it dot on the map about 85kms south of Auckland CBD. They are going to set up a new working town. In short, the new town will centre around a manufacturing plant for their beds, with houses for workers and a village making up a brand-new community. The last time a new town was proposed was Rolleston south of Christchurch and before that all the little towns (villages) dotting the Waikato river for the hydro dams and forestry projects in the centre of the north island. And history will tell us, as long as there are plenty of sustaining jobs the town will thrive long after the foundations were put in place.

The history of creating new working towns or cities especially out of England is well known.  Back in 1843 T.J Maslen is quoted as saying:

It may startle some political economists to talk of commencing the building of new cities … planned as cities from their first foundation, and not mere small towns and villages. … A time will arrive when something of this sort must be done … England cannot escape from the alternative of new city building.

In 1952 the Town Development Act was enacted in the UK with a purpose to encourage town development in county districts for the relief of congestion and over population elsewhere. And out of that in 1967 came Milton Keynes, a new town, located 80km north-west of London.

Image source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/

This new town (in planning documents, ‘new city’), Milton Keynes, with a target population of 250,000 (population 2011 – 230,000) and a ‘designated area’ of about 9,000 ha. The government established a Development Corporation (MKDC) to design and deliver this new city. The Corporation decided on a softer, more human-scaled landscape than in the earlier English new towns but with an emphatically modernist architecture. Recognising how traditional towns and cities had become choked in traffic, they established a ‘relaxed’ grid of distributor roads about 1 kilometre between edges, leaving the spaces between to develop more organically. An extensive network of shared paths for leisure cyclists and pedestrians criss-crosses through and between them. Again rejecting the residential tower blocks that had been so recently fashionable but unloved, they set a height limit of three storeys outside the planned centre.  50 years on, it is growing and a popular place to live.

Image source: https://www.ft.com/content/d5f8a830-3a1a-11e9-b72b-2c7f526ca5d0

Back to Covid free NZ.  Maybe it is shooting season (AKA an election) so we have the usual RMA bashing, a complete review of the resource management act and a revised national policy statement on urban development. Never have we been blessed with strategic direction, all seemingly trying to solve the same problem. Housing access and affordability.

A summary of the RMA review, for bedtime reading can be accessed through this link. https://www.mfe.govt.nz/publications/rma/new-directions-resource-management-new-zealand-report-of-resource-management-review

The National Policy Statement on Urban Development 2020 can be found under.

https://www.mfe.govt.nz/national-policy-statement-on-urban-development#:~:text=The%20National%20Policy%20Statement%20on%20Urban%20Development%202020%20is%20about,needs%20of%20our%20diverse%20communities.

This is weighty stuff, paradigm shifting. And still I wonder if they have figured out the issue. On one hand changing zoning traditional zoning patterns like we are seeing in Auckland leaves an existing suburban homeowner disenfranchised when a three level, multi-unit development replaces a single house. On the other hand, it provides for one of the necessities of life – housing. A commodity that should be traded not where limited supply causes prices to ratchet.

Go to Hamilton and you can have a house and a minor unit on 600m2 of land.  Once a new house and minor goes on a site, or a house is upgraded we are not going to see land pattern shift for 30 years.  However, the locals do not want intensity but those who cannot get access or those that want alternative access do. As we age, an apartment close to a village, town centre and amenities may be a better option than a large cold villa on 809m2 of garden that is now more Amazon than Kew Gardens.

So new planned towns, where new paradigms are foisted only on the odd cow or goat may be a better alternative to radically changing what we are proposing. Here’s to a good night sleep as you read and decide.