FEATURE
Poor town planning is a major problem in cities, leading to the rise of informal settlements.
“ Many large, central cities are losing jobs, especially the good paying ones; at the same time they have a sharp increase in the proportion of the population with low incomes and an increase in the cost of municipal services. The cost per person in New York was reported last year to be nearly eight times that of the average smaller town. Growing concentration of population has become a liability rather than an asset.”
In the light of this evidence, Richard Buckminster Fuller, the eminent engineer, planner, geometrician and innovator, concluded:
“ Cities, as we know them, are obsolete in all respects of yesterday’ s functions. To rebuild cities to make them accommodate the new needs of modern man is like trying to reconstruct and improve a wrecked ship, as the shipwreck rests upon the reef, pounded by the surf of technological obsolescence is invisible but is more inexorably powerful in its destruction than are the pounding of the waves of a visible ocean.
“ Man now sprawls horizontally upon the land uncheckable by the planners who enjoy the right to‘ suggest’. Visionless realtors, backed by government funds, operate indiscriminately in acquiring low-cost options on farmland upon which they install speculator houses.”
US Senator Mark Hatfield added:“ It is clear today that the great experiment of our cities is a failure. Derelict cities and centralised power are the twin symptoms of the sickness of these times, because it suits the policies of our centralised state to keep cities as the ' prisons of the poor’.”
Eric W Sanderson author of TERRA NOVA The New World after Oil, Cities and Suburbs [ 2014 ], wrote:“ Three powerful forces – oil cars and suburbs that buoyed the American Dream. They made it possible for the nation’ s economy to flourish and our power grow. Yet now across many different measures the quality of life America is declining. Cars consume 20 % of our income, kill and maim, discourage exercise and force us to squander time in traffic. Expensive sprawling culturally barren suburbs devour farmland and cheapen our existence.”
All major South African cities are now experiencing traffic‘ grid lock’ which was explained by the famed town planner Lord Holford on a visit to South Africa in 1963 who said:“ Trying to solve the transport problem by providing more roads is like feeding the pigeons – the more you provide, the more they come.” Paradoxically, the same condition operates every time a government minister makes a statement about building houses or upgrading squatter camps which encourages more people to arrive from rural areas.
See page 28 for more.
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SEPTEMBER- OCTOBER 2016
AFFORDABLE
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