The Dunedin townbelt

Abstract

This is a study of the origins and development of the town-belt in Dunedin. The study has a strong historical emphasis and seeks to provide a better understanding of the concept of greenbelts and the place of New Zealand towns in their development.

A Brief History: The concept of a greenbelt has been applied through a long period of history, which has given rise to a wide range of differing greenbelt forms.

Some of the earliest forms were found in British medieval towns, where a green area of land circled the perimeter of the town walls. This land provided the food supply for the town.

Elizabeth I of England, in the 16th Century, used a ‘cordon sanitaire’, three miles wide around the city of London. In this no manner of buildings were to occur. The intention of the 'cordon sanitaire' was to stop the spread of plague by stopping the spread of the city.

A century later, James I similarly prohibited buildings within 10 miles of the city gates and required that new houses were sited on at least four acres. These efforts to control the growth of London were largely unsuccessful. They did, however, initiate the idea of a green area around the city to define its growth.

Today, the common meaning of the term greenbelt refers to its use in the British context. This is due to the wide application of the greenbelt concept in Britain in the early 20th Century, as a means of confining the growth of cities and towns. The Garden City Movement, which built new towns surrounded by a greenbelt and the London Greenbelt which was a greenbelt area designated to confine an existing city, gave rise to a great deal of awareness of the concept of greenbelts.

A dictionary defines the term 'greenbelt' as being: ‘A strip of recreation land or farmland usually owned or controlled by a public agency, encircling a community as a protection against objectionable property use’.

At this stage, however, it is important to emphasise that the modern usage of the greenbelt concept referred to above, arose only after there had been a long period without practical application. In the early 20th Century, when the idea of the modern greenbelt was widely applied, there were no prototypes in Britain which the Garden Cities or the London Greenbelt could have been modelled upon.

However, although absent from British soils, the concept had found application in Britain's colonies. In many new towns in the 18th and 19th Centuries, in several countries including North America, Australia and New Zealand, greenbelts arose in a variety of different forms.

It is this application and development of the greenbelt concept in the British colonies that this study addresses. The towns in Australia and New Zealand which were models of the concept as it developed prior to the British modern usage of green belts are looked at in depth.