Public Committee for Restoration
The Public Committee for Restoration or simply The Committee was an influential advocacy active between 1944 and 1977 in Kien-k'ang, the Themiclesian capital city. The group's name refers to its initial, public objective of reversing the devastations of the Pan-Septentrion War in Kien-k'ang and re-create its shape before the war. But subsequent actions taken by the Committee, especially after 1949, have been characterized less by a didactic adherence to restoration but the advancement of various objectives that did not necessarily exist before the war. The Committee, controlled by exclusive cliques of landowners and major business interests and exercising influence in the budgetary process and the financial sector, has been accused of promoting class-based segregation that have ethnic overtones or implications, though the group has denied such characterizations in the 70s.
Throughout its lifetime, the Committee supported slum clearances, urban beautification, and centralization of municipal administration. Its slogan was "a powerful and beautiful city that we love", generally characterizing its resolved opposition of giving any voting power to the countryside or the middle class moving into it. In the 1940s and 50s, the Committee advocated aggressive corrective action where they claimed slum conditions (which not all agree were slum-like) constituted a "threat" and require re-development into "respectable" neighbourhoods. It also opposed the influx of motor vehicles into the city centre when car ownership dramatially increased in the 50s and supported the imposition of the Kien-k'ang congestion charge. Carter called the group an "early promoter of an extreme form of gentrification that only lost momentum because it became successful".
Insofar as polluting industries and ways of life it deemed less desirable receded out of Kien-k'ang-proper, the Committee's advocacy has been found to have no clear ethnic motivation, in principle. The Committee also rarely advocated for municipal action outside of Great Kien-k'ang, the medieval limits of the city. However, it decidedly opposed the re-apportionment of representation in the Kien-k'ang Council, which before its major reform in 1983 represented the medieval city and incorporated towns in the metropolitan area nearly exclusively. Older suburbs established before 1962 had but token representation of one councillor per country, and newer suburbs established after 1962 and exurbs had to contend with virtual representation by appointed City Senators.