been considered ‘smart’, and the neomodernist delivery of that which is actually
‘clever’ – in a word, balanced. The chapter starts with an exploration of the urban
multiple-belief ethos and the urban-humanized ecosystem, offering a critique and
an urban sense of place, variety, community and uniqueness.
Yesterday’s Solutions, Today’s Problems
The periphery-to-centre city montage (previous chapter, figure 4.3) depicted the
phenomenon of ‘podded’ and ‘chunked’ 20-year look-ahead developer-led urban
expansion. This represents the modern – of the twentieth century – rural into sub-
urban circumstance beyond which the Edge City and ex-urbanization phenome-
non has become an extension.^3
Suburban podding into tracts, ironically depicted as something they seldom are
- neighbourhoods – was aided between the two World Wars by the mass pro-
duction of automobiles and a reducing set of vehicle operating cost. From Peter
Rowe (1991) there is the observation that:
In 1925 the average automobile travelled some 23 miles per service dollar,
sharply increasing to 112 miles by 1945...[and]...vehicle operating costs plum-
meted from between 10 to 18 cents per mile during the first decade of this century
to slightly over 4 cents per mile during the 1930s...[and]...tyre performance
increased threefold.Consequent to these operating and servic-
ing cost reductions, along with the bur-
geoning pattern of post-World War I
single-family household formations, there
occurred (by the 1920s in North America,
later in Australasia) a demographic
crossover, after which the population of
Anglo settler nations became forever more
predominately urban than rural, and more
middle-incomed than poor. Early suburbia
represented freedom and became ‘utopia’ for these first-
time incomers, a flight from rural drudgery and mid-
city congestion.
This pattern of suburbanization was initiated before
World War I by tram and train rolling-stock transporta-
tion, a phenomenon based on affordability of a car for
each adult, succeeding the between-the-wars situation
of one automobile for each household. At first the pat-
terning became podded out, notin accordance with an
‘onion skinned banding’. Suburbanization grew out of
a nuclear-family urban settlement option and prefer-
ence, and was ‘chunked’ into being as leapfrog zonings.
Urban Growth Management 189Hamilton, NZ