types? Why curvilinear illegibility imposed upon gentle
landscapes? Why so spaced apart yet lacking in privacy?
Why so costly to maintain? Why no allowance for
diverse accommodations and cultural beliefs? Why so
little varietal mix of households by size, ethnicity and
income?
It has also to be asked: is the received situation really
all that bad, or all that wrong? Some American and Aus-
tralian writing (Donaldson 1969; Stretton 1989; Bamford
1992; Garreau 1992) applaud aspects of the suburban
lifestyle lampooned previously, and claim traditional-
urban suburbs of the settler society kind to be the envy
of people throughout the rest of the world. British
writing (Gwilliam et al. 1999) extols ‘the suburbs as vital
components of the urban mix in economic, social,
political and environmental terms’ but of course British
suburbs have been in place for a much longer period
of time and are of intrinsically higher average density
than those of the transpacific new world. French philoso-
pher and sociological commentator Jean Baudrillard
(Amérique, 1994) discerns, from a Euro-American per-
spective, the vast North American urban and suburban experience as an unpre-
tentious cultural freedom – which of course it once was, being now morphed into
low-rent ‘grey zone’ market-rate housing areas riddled with boredom, petty crime
and family violence.
Strong pro-suburb reasoning is expressed in Greg Bamford’s ‘Density, Equity
and the Green Suburb’ (1992) a conference paper which argued that the case made
against extensive urban sprawl is ‘deceptively value laden’.^12 The
caseforstandard suburbia he makes out hinges very much on the
benefits deriving from property maintenance and gardening.
Bamford also has a rosy view of the active recreational potential
of low-density suburbia, and waxes lyrically on the value to chil-
dren which low densities harbour for ‘redressing some of the
disadvantages of class’.^13 Wider claims for the virtue of the house-
plot-car arrangement is that for other reasons – mall shopping as
entertainment, tooling around in the family car as recreation,
security – suburbs are the housing preference to which bread-
winning adults in settler societies aspire. A two-car garage, an
outdoor barbecue area, maybe a pool, access to a non-threatening
mall – especially so in a sunbelt setting – defines an alluring settler society sub-
urban ‘reality and dream’ combination.
Settler society nation suburbs are profligate of energy resources on account of
the car-based organization of life within low-density layouts. There is also the high
unit service cost for piped-in and wired-along supply utilities, the high disposal
costs associated with getting rid of the water-borne and dry-garbage wastes, and
the community costs and social damage. To appreciate these shortcomings, as a
Urban Growth Management 197Large houses, small plots. West
Auckland.All credit to Bamford
(1992) for this shaft of
prescience; the need to
avoid consolidation
outcomes which ‘look as
though someone put the
plans for a conventional
suburb in the photo-
copier and pressed the
20 percent reduction
button’!