Sustainable Urban Planning

192 Practice

the American Dream(1989) paraphrased here as ‘failing to deliver high-quality

urban environments’, ‘excluding low-income and minority families’, ‘engender-

ing corruption’, ‘not dealing adequately with regional problems’.^8 To this listing

can be added the findings of a Porter–Phillips–Lassar study on behalf of the Urban

Land Institute (1991) establishing three main ‘Arguments Against Traditional

Zoning’: that it is ‘static’, that it ‘serves parochial interests’, and that it ‘cannot

ensure high quality development’.

Assembly-line processing by local government functionaries, approving the

conversion of raw rural land into suburbia, defies community reason. When the

banality of pop-up suburban tracts are critically commented upon, local govern-

ment functionaries blame ‘the system’. They declaim that they follow orders from

higher authority, without bothering to initiate changes in what they deliver and

dump into people’s lives.

Filling in edge city space piecemeal with low-density suburbia of the formulaic

kind has proved less than satisfactory, both as a habitat for incoming multiple-

belief residents, and by taking productive rural land out of food and fibre pro-

ductionforever. Of course much rural land is notusefully productive, and on those

landscapes the case againsttidily sporadic residential settlement falters, there

being nothing wrong, within an open democracy, about opting for an ex-urban

broad-acre lifestyle providedit does not impose any unfair community burdens on

the neighbouring city or induce environmental offence.^9

Figure 5.1 Radburn: and Radburn Rationalized.

The left-side depiction of Radburn Place, New Jersey shows how the division of home access

between the ‘visitor’ frontal façade and the ‘trade person’ rear access proved costly to implement.

Yet when rationalized to a quarter acre (1,000 m^2 ) Australasian situation (the right-side depiction)

it can be seen that the area of a site required for rear lane access can be lessthan the area of site

required for direct off-street access. This rationality is even more pertinent at higher densities.