Making park access harder

In “City limits” (February 6), I felt Errol Haarhoff’s PhD student needed deeper research into why parks were easier to access in affluent suburbs, designed in enlightened times, than in South Auckland. The lack of parks and green corners has less to do with affluence and more to do with the developers, town planners and councils in the 1960s and 70s when vast areas of land were ripe for subdivision.

Surveyors, who were the planners for big private housing subdivisions, knew about cluster housing surrounded by green spaces, neighbourhood lanes, bike lanes and local shops. They drew colourful plans following this policy, but time and again these plans were rejected by a developer hell-bent on squeezing as many sections as possible into areas of up to 200 acres, and the councils, showing no enthusiasm for community parks, approved them.

My husband as a young surveyor spent his evenings hand-drafting and colouring his plans filled with curved roads, parks, bike lanes, schools and shopping centres before becoming distressed over the bland, monotonous suburbs for which he was finally responsible.

Jean Goldschmidt
(Auckland)

KNOTTY SUBJECT

I thought Aotearoa was all about getting rid of its colonial image, but it is hard not to see hypocrisy in the necktie debate.

If ties are a symbol of the