State planning in Porirua

The satellite community of Porirua, 20 km from New Zealand's capital, Wellington was a collection of planned suburban development to meet this demand.

The 'Porirua city centre was designed around this British town format with clustering of commercial, retail and entertainment areas but separation of pedestrians and traffic’.

[4]: 28  Schrader suggests the reason for the garden city direction was explored in New Zealand was an ideological desire to link to the ‘mother country’ of Britain.

[10]: 24 Schrader argues that this narrative made its mark in New Zealand under the first Labour government in 1935 ‘with a massive state housing program, based on garden city principles’.

[5] In the 1950s and 1960s State Housing designs changed due to cost, to material shortages and to concerns about 'urban sprawl' in Porirua and in wider New Zealand.

[14] It was markedly different from the approach adopted by Michael Joseph Savage in 1939, where 400 different designs by architects meant no two homes were exactly alike[13] and where low-density, single-unit dwellings characterised State housing in Porirua.

The Anglican Church's 1963 report on Porirua East, which was dominated by duplex housing, accused the government of "forgetting the social needs of the community when planning the area".

[11]: 41  Images of Porirua East appeared in 1970s publicity-material as an example of what to avoid in future housing schemes - because of its bland uniformity and multiplex nature.