Sustainable Urban Planning

lower-income ex-urban dwellers, people living a low-cost rustic

existence beyond vigilant bureaucratic censure. For both sets of

ex-urbanite dweller there is an avoidance of the costs of provid-

ing conventional urban utilities (roads sealed, garbage collected,

water supplied), and or also for social support services (district

nurse, welfare visitors, postal deliveries, policing). Many people

become dispirited, some demented, by the isolation of the ex-

urban broad-acre lifestyle, and householders soon tire of roof-

water supply, septic-tank clean-outs, and dry garbage disposal,

the concluding and frequent outcome being relocation back to the

urban fold. The well-incomed category can organize all their social

needs privately, but within the poor category the welfare require-

ments eventually become a cost-burden to the adjoining city.

This calls into question the economic disharmony and social

undesirability of ex-urbanization and low density suburbaniza-

tion. Thereby rests the case forGrowth Pattern Management

(chapter 4); and the Urban Retrofit Clustering strategy attended

to later in this chapter.

Urban ‘conformity patterns’ and ‘consumption cultures’ are now

offered and reviewed.

Urban conformity patternsseemingly furnish more space (bigger

houses, larger sites), more mobility (privately owned cars), dif-

ferent houses (predominantly three-bedroomed), as though this

is variety, when in fact all that is available is replication. Formu-

laic planning and building codes have delivered subdivision

adjoining subdivision, from which there emerges what Aus-

tralians describe as ‘rat-run’ urban sprawl. Malvina Reynolds

(1963) cuts to the quick of the matter with the often quoted, very

Californian, ballad Little Boxes:

Little boxes on the hillside

Little boxes made of ticky-tacky

Little boxes, little boxes

Little boxes all the same.

There’s a green one and a pink one

And a blue one and a yellow one

And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky

And they all look just the same

Reflect again upon the fact that over 80 per

cent of settler society populations are urban

living, and that in North America more

than half that population is staked out on

highly inter-visible noise-sharing plots at a

low overall density, averaging – net of plots

194 Practice

In the early 1990s the
Auckland University
Planning School invited
some overseas
candidates for academic
interview. One of these
was a woman raised and
trained in Russia, but by
then resident in the
United States. A settling-
in programme had
enabled her to visit
several non-metropolitan
middle-American cities.
Flying in to each airport
she pointed a video
camera out the window
and simply recorded the
quasi-urban scene that
came into view. This
video was part of her
presentation. The hum of
the engines and a frank
commentary perfectly
underscored the videoed
confusion and chaos. For
city after city we were
shown a Dante’s Inferno
of scattered housing,
quasi-rural living,
industrial farming,
recreation patches, scrap
yards, commercial strips
and an occasional horse
standing forlorn.