| Summary: | Blending approaches from urban, social, and intellectual history, this research presents a portrait of 'slum ideology' in New Zealand during the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century. Freemans Bay, Auckland, provides a focus for this research. New Zealanders' hostility toward 'slums' is explained within the context of an intellectual and attitudinal environment characterized by an aversion to urbanity and concomitant idealization of the rural. The notion that New Zealand embodied an innately agrestic 'ideal society' as distinct from the industrialized, urbanized 'Old World' featured prominently in constructions of the 'slum'. It is demonstrated that the city council-led redevelopment of Freemans Bay in the mid-twentieth century was intended as a social corrective, incorporating principles of familyoriented neighbourhood planning devised by the American sociologist and urban thinker Clarence Perry.
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