Abstract:
Discussing perceptions around slums and accompanying efforts to ameliorate commonly accepted rhetoric, this research melds approaches from urban, social, and intellectual history to present a portrait of ‘slum ideology’ in New Zealand during the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century. Freemans Bay, Auckland, perhaps the city’s most notorious slum during the first half of the twentieth century, provides a focus for this research. New Zealanders’ perceptions toward slums are explained within the context of an intellectual and attitudinal environment characterised by an aversion to urbanity and concomitant idealisation of the rural. The notion that New Zealand embodied an innately agrestic ‘ideal society’ as distinct from the industrialised, urbanised ‘Old World’ also featured prominently in New Zealanders’ attitudes toward slums. The perceived manifestation of slums in New Zealand during the period studied was based predominately on social as opposed to physical factors. The redevelopment of slums is shown to have been intended as a social corrective, linked to the idea of environmental determinism. Local authorities, in seeking to remedy slums, borrowed methods employed overseas, chiefly those associated with the modern movement in architecture and urban planning as well as the principles of neighbourhood planning devised by the American sociologist and urban thinker Clarence Perry. In attempting to reproduce these overseas methods, authorities in New Zealand neglected to give adequate consideration to their suitability for a local context, with redevelopment consequently encountering major setbacks.