Patiti Point and South Beach

When I arrived in Timaru from the UK ten years ago, seeing the town that would be my new home for the first time, I thought what a charming but hotch-potch place it was. Everywhere I looked I saw pragmatic solutions: a spindly pedestrian bridge linking the seamens mission to the red light district; a port feeder road like a helter skelter borrowed from the fairground below; a carpark on a roof; a statue facing the public toilets. It’s like nobody planned the place, it just grew up organically like a child’s railway layout. I was amazed to be in a country where I could choose any design for my house and plonk it down much as I pleased within a reasonably flexible framework of rules. Fast forward to now and I start to see the problem: the short-term approach to planning is coming home to roost. The port sprawling southwards because it’s too hard to consolidate the already-developed port industrial zone. Nowhere to put a feeder road into the port, clip-on proposals like the North Street overpass competing with brute force solutions like driving a four-lane highway down Evans Street. A funeral home that wants to shift to Recreation 2 from beneath an overpass that isn’t even going to be there. My suggestion is that the town planners are given a six-month sabbatical to tour provincial towns around the world and observe other people’s solutions to similar problems. When they come back they should be given greater authority, and should not have closed networks of entrepreneurs pushing their arms up their backs. This is a town in need of a new mission statement, a common agenda, a code of ethics, and a systems approach to a cohesive plan for its future. The Council are very helpful in providing information when one asks, but I believe a more public display of proposed projects would alleviate suspicion, and would help us all feel engaged in the process, and subsequently engender pride in our town.