The new town that never was

摘要

On the face of it, the subject of this article might seem curiously arcane. It concerns a new town that never was, Rolleston near Christchurch, in New Zealand, a country which, after its initial colonial settlement, showed little further interest in creating new communities. Aside from a few small, planned one-industry resource towns, the only attempt to create a large and diverse new town for planned urban decentralisation was Rolleston. Yet it had only the briefest of existences (from 1973 to 1976) as a hypothetical planning proposal and was then abandoned before it began.