out to establish an agricultural rural emphasis. In relation to the
control of building construction (Department of the Environment
PPG 12: 1992) ‘new house building and other new development
in the open countryside, away from established settlements,
should be strictly controlled. The fact that a single house on a par-
ticular site would be unobtrusive is not in itself a good argument;
it could be repeated too often.’ In contrast to an apparent narrow
attention to the matter of housing PPG 12 establishes that ‘Agri-
culture will remain the major user of land in the countryside, but
a decreasing one’...(and that)...‘The guiding principle in the
wider countryside is that development should benefit the rural economy and
maintain or enhance the environment’ – in a phrase that there is to be conserva-
tion with development.
The British system of development plans (comprising structure
plans and local plans) is not overly prescriptive. They provide
guidance, incentives and controls to an extent and in a way which
ensures that developers cannot pursue or change the use of rural
land for private reasons which are against wider public interests.
The outcome imprinted so agreeably upon Britain’s rural land-
scapes may not be procedurally adapted to the Anglo New World
context, but the example is there, available as a cultural model to
keep in view.With much of North America away from the western and eastern
seaboards, and throughout Australasia, the quasi-urbanization of
productive agricultural land is an incautious profligacy. The
damage to the regional economy (transportation and utility pro-
visioning costs), damage to the social community (atomized
and isolated individuals distanced from community help), and
damage to the environment (wrong land uses, free-enterprise
soullessness and ugliness), all pile up as arguments against
unrestrained quasi-urban development, and add to the case for
sustainable regional growth pattern management. Yet figure 4.4, Suburban-
residential and rural-residential compared, illustrates a perversity, the cost
savings for a rural-residential arrangement relative to a suburban-residential
provisioning.
Containment within agreed urban growth boundaries, and attention to the issues
which are essentially urban (industry, utilities, housing, transportation, employ-
ment) is the nub to growth-managed urban-rural patterning. Of course recreation
for the urban majority penetrates adjoining rural areas, and further complicates
the case for an urban-rural distinction. Here Cullingworth (1997) notes that ‘secur-
ing acceptability is difficult, enormously time-consuming, and fraught with polit-
ical problems....[yet] acceptability across the spectrum of interests is the key
characteristic of successful growth management policies’.
In the Oregon context the set of ‘attractive to business’ policies is given
expression in a total of nineteen goals, within which a set of five urban goals160 Practice
The landscape imprint
for the British Isles has
been the beneficiary of
massive and historically
deep research
culminating in the
intricateStudies of Field
Systems in the British
Isles, edited by A. R. H.
Baker and R. A. Butlin,
1973.Sustainable farming, with
an emphasis on food
production for adjacent-
city consumption is the
catch-call emanating
from the January 2002
United Kingdom
Commission on Farming.Robert Kaplan views the
Northwestern United
States growth
management and urban
conservation as a ‘stagey
perfection questionably
difficult to transfer or
replicate’.
An Empire Wilderness,
1998