on-site food production, roughly summarizes the eco-village concept pragmati-
cally. Eco-village sites would also capture and use natural rainfall as a source of
water, and be served by a dedicated village sewage and nutrient recovery plant.
In other environmental ways urban greenfield settlements would respect the
natural heritage of their setting (flora, fauna, wetlands) during village construc-
tion, and at the landshaping, infill, construction and (particularly) at the residen-
tial occupancy stages.^47
A sustainable-as-possible lifestyle can be incorporated into an eco-village when
material inputs and outputs are brought into equilibrium – mainly by recycling,
reusing, repairing and restoring. Such land settlement has been thought through
in the Australasian context by Bill Mollison in his Permaculture(1988). Mollison’s
advocacy is for extra effort to be put into sewage digestion and bio-gas produc-
tion, storm-water and greywater reutilization, and compost production along with
other self-sufficiency and reduced movement and curtailed transportation prac-
tices. Given the obstacles strewn across the path of greenfield village projects, full-
on eco-villages warrant respect and acclaim because their degree of sustainable
attainment vaults beyond this book’s advocacy for a tolerable harmony.^48
Raw land suburbanization
This passage sets down guidelines additional to the basic resi-
dential componentry given already in box 5.2, the purpose
now being to establish the ways and means to achieve legibility
(communities instead of subdivision), cost savings, landscape
enhancement and an improved sociability for the mainly subur-
ban, rural-into-urban land transformation, emphatically argued
against, but unstoppable!
A notable alteration in the progression of urban expansion over
the last century was the ratcheting up of conventional subdivi-
sion standards, engaging regulations which were mostly a codi-
fication and accumulation of negatives, and a move away from
‘deemed to comply’ possibilities. For standard detached dwelling
greenfield subdivisions the changes included refined provisions
for larger houses on smaller plots with undergrounded utilities.
In relation to house building,changes took the form of ever-
increasing earthquake resilient, fire resistant, vermin-proof,
thermal barrier, rot-proof, services-in/wastes-out, regulation.
Away from the inner suburbs through to conventional subur-
bia, there is the fringe, ‘edge city’, where the space opportunity
provided by 20-year look-ahead zoning has been, historically, for
maximum-sized urban lots. After 80 years of automobile use, sub-
urbia acquired a fully vehicle-dominated mantle, often with the
garage integral to the living rooms of the home in a manner
designed to be a barrier to eye-contact with neighbours, further
Urban Growth Management 227‘In 1949 a finished lot
accounted for around
11 percent of total cost,
increasing steadily to
about 24 percent by
1982.’
Quoted by Peter
Rowe, 1991.From the United States
(1996)Congress for
New Urbanism
‘Neighbourhoods should
be diverse in use and
population; communities
should be designed for
the pedestrian and
transit (system) as well
as the car; cities and
towns should be shaped
by physically defined and
universally acceptable
public spaces and
community institutions;
urban spaces should be
framed by architecture
and landscape design that
celebrate local history,
climate, ecology, and
building practice.’