towns, following a nineteenth-century urban concentration, is a
twentieth-century de-concentration, now tracking back again to a
twenty-first century reconcentration. This physical emphasis on
concentration (compaction) is one result of the lack of satisfaction
with city suburbanization, where all those ‘costs’ reviewed earlier
hit the pocketbooks of the ‘placemakers’, make inroads upon their
relationships and marriages, and destabilize their personal per-
ceptions of worth and achievement. It is problematic enough that
modern atomistic living induces all manner of individual dis-
benefits and dissatisfactions; what is additionally apparent is that
low-density suburban ‘place-making’ seldom induces Gemein-
schaft– community exchange and interaction. The prognosis is a
negative double whammy: thatin addition to the marginal social utility of the
fixed-option (plot-house-car) suburban lifestyle there exists career uncertainty; and
thatthe suburban neighbourhood does not provide solace or support to individ-
uals and families caught up in the tragedy of unemployment.
Within the living memory of most middle-income and mid-life adults their job
satisfaction has been the handmaiden to job certainty. Careers, once ‘for keeps’ are
now a feature of the past: and, ironically, just as people are living longer lives they
have to make do with longer hours on the job (if they have one) anda shorter
career path! Indignity is heaped upon indignity for those at the
intersection of community indifference and job denial. Those
worst affected are left, mostly in suburbia, with failed marriages,
job redundancies, and the isolation of longevity. Of course
suburbs and suburbia cannot be blamed wholly for all this, an
underlying influence being the economic and employment sea-
change. Service tasks, manufacturing skills and management
operations are now transferable, transportable and transmigratory. A high pro-
portion of the workforce is ‘on contract’ and ‘on bonuses’ for productivity. The
workplace, now dislocated from the homeplace, has lost its central meaning. In a
phrasing from Richard Sennett (1995) ‘the market(place) does not nurture the
dignity of the worker’ nor, in corollary, does the suburban home place provide
much support for the jobless person.
What is seldom realized by those who have grown up with generally dys-
functional tract housing is that there are better ways to arrange residential living,
the alternatives available from the European, Asian, and African prototypes
sketched out in figure 5.2 as Urban morphologies.
Dysfunctional North American and Australasian suburbs are evident. The sales
hype suggests usually the contrary, that all is well. At issue is a large bundle of
socio-economic habitat questions. In terms of Urban Growth Management a major
challenge is the seeking-out of different and better ways for constituting residen-
tial living in a manner which facilitates exchange and interaction, reducing the
amount of travel in order to get to work and school, and for enjoying the natural
environment. Additionally challenging is the retrofitting reinvention and re-
expression of established suburbia. To engender – not of course for itself, but for
Urban Growth Management 201‘The dream house is a
uniquely American (also
very Australasian) form
because for the first time
in history, a civilization
has created a utopian
ideal based on the house
rather than the city.’
Ralph Waldo Emerson
quoted in Kenneth
Jackson’s Crabgrass
Frontier, 1985The Corrosion of
Character: The Personal
Consequences of Work in
the New Capitalism.
Richard Sennett, 1998.