Urban Growth Management 195and half the adjoining street – ten to twelve (Australian) and six to ten (western
USA) detached dwellings per hectare.^10 These low densities make public transport
untenable, and, ironically, fail to meet either the privacyoraccessibilityideals. These
can be portrayed as the attainment of privacy and insulation against ‘sounds sight-
ings and smells’ yet within neighbourhoods of sufficient density to support a
viable public transport service which fits in with daily journey-to-work, shopping,
schooling, entertainment, community watch, and recreational needs.
Change occurred for suburbs over the latter half of the twentieth century:
throughout Australasia average plots halved in area, yet the houses built on them
doubled in size, and the level of ownership and the usage of cars increased
enormously. The suburban ‘grey zone’ (Belmont 2002) became the delivered and
received pattern, with no consideration of any variety or alternative to the free-
standing house laid out with a front lawn and back garden on a freehold title, the
automobile transporting your body, and advertising transporting your mind. And
were youin business to provide plots, houses, automobiles or appliances then,
according to this prognosis, you would indeed be content as a supplier, for the
resource supply has been captured and the market engineered. In short the
formula suburb is a commercially corralled pushover, and urban dwellers in
settler societies mostly find themselves believing that their trussed-up conform-
ity is good fortune; that is until they visit a worthy alternative! The average sub-
urbanite may prefer to not admit that they have been staked out in accordance
with this pattern of urban conformity, but this is pretty much how it is in terms
of the market-directed pattern on offer.
Urban consumption cultureshoots home the conformity point. Given a plot-
house-car lifestyle structure as dominant,
plot-holding, home-owning, appliance-
operating and car-running concerns take
over suburban lives, pattern their con-
sumption, and condition their thinking. The
living-consuming-thinking pattern which
has evolved is defined by child needs (pap
food), child pleasures (low-gratification
television), and child consumerism (play-
thing cars and dinky houses). The concur-
rent ‘freedom’ to take your mind anywhere (multi-choice television channels and
access to the World Wide Web), and the availability of an automobile to transport
your person to all places as potential destinations, defines the supposed liberality
of the suburban condition. In fact suburban residents are mostly contained within
an ‘automobile culture’, ‘bungalow culture’, ‘mall culture’, ‘television culture’.
In all of this television can be regarded as an essentially passive experience –
although it is of course much more. On this matter John Friedmann (1987: 351)
crackles with indignation and awe:
Day in, day out, individually or as a group, household members sit huddled in front
of the screen that glows in the semi-darkness, gazing at the commercial entertain-
ment, the news, and the sport along with millions of other spectators equally mes-