their policy grasp and design power to improve suburban provisioning to the
highest and best outcome, as well as rendering suburban housing economically
affordable and ecologically fit. To that end the depiction given in box 5.3 as a
Suburban design-detail code is a ‘trigger list’.
At the highest level of new urban construction some localities can be given over
to TODs, MUDs and Co-housing, and some others to the urban greenfield (eco-
village) development ideal traversed earlier, although the main outcome will con-
tinue to be conventional street-frontaged housing ‘densified modified and layered’
and above all else ‘flexibly zoned’ and ‘intensely designed’. These are some of the
alternatives to orthodox raw land suburbanization. Also to be considered is the
late Francis Tibbalds’s (1992) statement on the ‘Design and Evolution of Urban
Design Codes’ in which he advocated an ‘inclusive collaborative approach’.^53
Raw land subdivision economies. Viewed objectively, there is no justification, in terms
of sustainability principles, for urban expansion onto productive or potentially
productive agricultural land, infilled urban housing being the preferred ‘com-
paction and retrofit’ option (reviewed in the next passage). A practical diffi-
culty with the rural-urban crossover is that local government planning services
have little power to effectively and consistently divert private property owners
away from low-density suburbanization and greenfields expansion, or to influ-
ence and direct suburban expansion inwards toward the pursuit and attainment
of densification. Given the inevitability of some suburbanization onto greenfield
sites, it is pragmatic to outline the ways by
which the best can be made of this contra-
indicated process.
Developer-led raw land suburbanization
can achieve some longer-term economies
associated with sustainability goals,
moving in the direction of utility
economies, social service efficiencies and
of course the attainment of everlasting
environmental benefits. A prime focus, in
terms of the sustainability ideal, is for land
savings, essentially avoiding the uptake for
suburbia of good agricultural land. In these
terms, raw land urbanization should be
confined to low-production land classes –
elite soils and most landscapes useful to agriculture and silviculture being
declared off-limits, without waiver. Within-project land savings achieve further
economies deriving from a reduction of the excess space allocated to plots, from
a reduction of the length of utility runs, and savings from the reduced provision
of road frontage and road width. Everlasting land savings are a move in the direc-
tion of the sustainable ideal and the intensification ideal combined – both being
socially and politically sound outcomes. Most easily understood are cost savings.
If the raw land cost of a 10-metre frontage is around half the raw land layout
cost for a 20-metre frontage, then that saving is permanent and valuable simply
Urban Growth Management 233