focus. Straightening out streets and orienting them in purposeful directions
(toward schools, shops, workplaces) in association with green-way pedestrian and
cycle links is important.
There is a need for more affordable (starter) housing and ‘live alone’ accom-
modation. The issues of ‘what proportions?’ and in ‘which locations?’ defy
resolution with certainty. The political squint of left-leaning agencies sets out to
achieve salt-and-pepper arrangements. With politically right-leaning agencies
‘affordable’ and ‘live alone’ housing will either be non-existent or will be sown
like a self-conscious monocrop in redevelopment projects.
With urban transportation the choice of policy between cars or transit is hedged
by two constraints. Firstis the received pattern of any given city. Those focused
down to the water’s edge, like most significant Anglo New World centres, con-
strain and concentrate their transportation problems into geographically limited
corridors. And for any corridor where more than 20 per cent of the CBD-bound
traffic is routed, there arise conditions for automobile gridlock ‘problems’ and an
extremely costly transit ‘solution’. The secondcomplexity relates to the income
class of the population within urban corridors. Where there is rail transit, for
example, low-income populations generate low-usage rates and low returns on
investment because poor people in the New World context own cars, and prefer
the security automobiles offer rather than risk the violence of riding the trains. On
the other hand ‘white-collar’ urban corridors harbour people who are prepared
to use and pay for train-transit services, entrusting their automobiles to the transit
station car park, and themselves and their school-bound children to the transit
service.
When rural lands are converted into suburban landscapes, human intervention
is of course dominant. Get the outcome wrong and it pretty well stays wrong.
Inadequately contrived meso-density suburbs are difficult to undo, a mediocrity
which gets enshrined for the rest of a residential locality’s history – essentially the
dumping of a wrongdoing from one decade into perpetuity. Finally, in addition
to all that has been stated already, inherited suburbanization has been largely
a product of the male imagination: the clear counter-predication is that the
neomodern suburb for the future must embody feminist, elderly and child-scale
desiderata.Urban retrofit compaction and clustering
This passage heralds the most important, the least practised, and also the most
woefully neglected urban growth management planning operation^56 – the retro-
fitting, upgrading, compaction and clustering of established suburbs. In his quirky
and prescient Edge Citythe investigative journalist-author Joel Garreau (1992: 228)
explains the transformation into neighbourhoods which takes place in the matur-
ing of suburbs: ‘Individual property owners continually upgrade their places.
They look around at what other people are doing, decide what is good or bad,
eliminate discordant elements, and bring their community closer to what is per-
ceived to be the ideal.’ What is heartening about property-owner participation238 Practice