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For Alexandra Cunningham, the model town suggested an uncomfortable metaphor for model lives. And, certainly, on a grey Canterbury day, the disconnect between the promotional images of throngs of leisure-seekers basking in Gold Coast-style sunshine beside a bustling town centre and the reality of a sombre grid of vacant sections and car-less streets can be intense. The mockers and knockers of the blogosphere have had good sport from the Canterbury dream town.

For many, the idea of a planned community appears to be inherently suspect. Oh, Lord, save us from the types of people that are attracted to plastic worlds and lifestyles that are insulated from reality. I wonder how James and Biddy Gardner would feel about that categorisation. They have no regrets. They like the effort management puts into the social side. Their grandchildren love the lake. Naysayers irritate them—the media included.

He admits that there has been some justification. They burned the pine trees, which smoked Woodend out. But then they made good by giving everyone a free load of firewood. And during the earthworks, the north-easterlies whipped up sandstorms that took the paint off houses. Bryan Bird says he and his wife, June, shifted from Dunedin to be closer to family.

Around the corner, Keith McLaughlin is standing in his garage amid a stack of boxes. He and his wife, Chris, have been here for only a week. Ex-Christchurch originally, they bought a spec home in Kaiapoi in , then rented in Rangiora while they built their Pegasus house. Lifestyle was the attraction, Keith says.

He runs, cycles, swims, plays golf. For him and Chris, it seemed like a smart move to shift in now and see the town grow around them. I ask him about local scepticism towards Pegasus. They took up the offer of life membership, and they love it. Wait till summer. This place will go off. Over the past two summers, thousands of Cantabrians have made the half-hour drive to Pegasus to cool off in the lake. A million cubic metres of soil was excavated to create it, with the spoil spread on the residential sections to raise them above flood level. You can take your pick of a dozen beaches, either grey pebble or golden sand trucked up from Oamaru.

I watch a bobcat levelling land for a new constant-temperature swimming bay and gas-fired hot pools. All the children from Waikuku primary school, across the main highway from Pegasus, were photographed aboard the vessel before the lake was filled.

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For Pegasus, the dividend is huge, too. Paul Armstrong, the land project manager, says the school will give the town a heart and soul. Hornblow was in an upbeat mood when I met him, because he had just enrolled pupil number , just one short of the trigger point the Ministry of Education has set for the shift. Already the school has been acclimatising pupils to the move.

Children also get to use the driving range to hone their golf swing. The timing is up to the ministry, but Hornblow and Pegasus are hoping the move will happen in The town seems to be growing according to plan, and the man behind the plan—or a good chunk of it—is Don Miskell, a senior partner in the landscape architecture firm Boffa Miskell. At his office in Gloucester St, central Christchurch, he tells me the back story of the development.

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Waimakariri District Council had bought the site for a rubbish tip. Miskell remembers the call he received in from a client who told him the council had changed its mind about the landfill, and the land was now surplus to requirement. Would Miskell mind taking a look at it to see if it had potential for development. The aim has to be to create a new community.

It was the opportunity Miskell had been waiting for.

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For me, it was the social and design sides coming together. Southern Capital sold the project to Infinity in Who comes up with these names? Seaside, considered the first new-urbanist town though only a tenth the size of Pegasus was the filming location for The Truman Show. A cynic might suggest that Jim Carrey would not look out of place sailing to freedom on Lake Pegasus.

And people can build their boxes if they want. Pegasus has been designed to attract across the board of income and age. More suburban sprawl? Keep building at the margins? Worldwide, the trend is away from godzilla subdivisions marching to the horizon.

These goals line up with local policy guidelines, too. The New Zealand Urban Design Protocol, released by the Ministry for the Environment in , stresses diversity, inclusiveness, identity, shared vision, environmental sustainability and a distinctive sense of place. Ideally, the number of houses should equal the number of jobs, he says. In , Infinity sought to remedy the employment gap by launching a resident housing-plus-commercial project across State Highway 1 at Ravenswood, aimed at boosting commercial activity in the district.

Another missing ingredient is proximity to a railway line. New-urbanist principles stress the importance of easy access to public transport. The street grid, for one thing. What we did is narrow down the roads to make the perceived speed potential match the desired speed limit. The downside of narrow roads is that if two cars are parked opposite each other, a fire engine or ambulance might not be able to get through.

The design team addressed that issue by using an old-fashioned grid design, instead of the more conventional culs-de-sac. A grid provides two advantages, says Miskell. In the s, a lot of subdivisions were designed by surveyors, who thought they were being artistic and put in all these curving roads and culs-de-sac. You get lost. A grid fixes that problem. At the highway entrance, the visitor is greeted by six tall pou which depict the history of Maori settlement. Interpretive panels explain the stories within the carvings and give the impression that these are more than token totems. Other allusions to Maori habitation are more subtle.

Another road, appropriately named Nga Tupuna St, is in a direct line between Kaiapoi pa, on the northern boundary of the town, and Tutaepatu Lagoon, to the south—both of them key cultural reference points for the tangata whenua. The town design also provides for the possibility of a whare taonga museum , where treasures unearthed during development can be displayed, a whare karakia church , papakainga housing for kaumatua of the local hapu, plus a memorial garden for those who lost their lives defending the pa against Te Rauparaha in The wetland is another satisfaction.

It came from the work of Scottish landscape architect Ian McHarg, a pioneer of ecological planning. For a residential development called The Woodlands in Texas, McHarg designed a stormwater system based on swales—shallow drainage courses filled with porous material that filters runoff as it percolates through the system.

It was far cheaper than the conventional kerb-and-channel drainage system, and preserved the water table and environment. Grassed swales run through the town, collecting stormwater, passing it through gravel and sand filters and discharging it into the wetland. Reed beds remove further contaminants and purify the water as it trickles slowly northward and eastward, to river and sea.

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On a morning when the sky is a watery grey shroud, save for a strip of orange at the horizon where an ineffectual sun is struggling to break through, I trudge up the beach to the mouth of the Ashley River. At the mouth, whitebaiters are about, hoping for an early-season run.