By production of food closer to the consumer. By reducing crime and poleaxing
the drug trade. In summary, the need is to recognize and favour the longer haul,
to go with the ecology, to trend toward a higher density and an urban harmony
(refer also to the listing given in box 1.2, New-age pragmatics, chapter 1).
Furthermore, there is a community care factor to consider. Central and local
government administrations regulate as necessary, and many would argue that
they have little obligation to ‘deliver’, ‘care’ or ‘intervene’. This distinction may
lie at the heart of why there is, in settler societies, such a proliferation of cultur-
ally pitiable, uncaring, and dysfunctional households. Most city authorities have
not previously been in a constitutional position to adopt a proactive policy or
assume a subsidiarity preference. They have stuck – or been stuck – with tradi-
tional systems of statutory service provisioning and legally required quality
constraint.
That urban situation is changing. Local government has been exhorted to adopt
theAgenda 21desiderata (Appendix) although of itself that document does little
more than show a way. Ultimately, what local administrators need is devolution
of powers (subsidiarity) and the will and expertise to administer those powers.The greatest obstacle to change is the way that the corporate
and private sectors in Anglo settler society administrations
adhere and genuflect to exclusive landownership. This difficulty
counter-informs the fact that when new urban land construction
is being initiated on raw rural land the public imperative is to
secure, ahead of that changeover and as a condition to approval,
the appropriate heritage-conservation, public-access and public-
space needs. The defining moment of change, the roll-over
from an open-area rural space to urbanized occupation has, in the
past, conformed to the principle (Parkinson paraphrased)
whereby ‘the most momentous decisions [about roll-over change]
get taken with the least expenditure of time and effort’. The future
imperative is that, precisely because these roll-over events are
once-and-forever decisions of everlasting social and economic significance, they
must be correctly detailed ‘down’ from a societally sensitive sustainable-as-
possible policy toward an overall community ‘best fit’ practice. Urban adminis-
trations should exercise the interventionist powers detailed within the Place-
making and urban reform reviews, and the ‘boxes’ and ‘figures’ of guidelines
given earlier in this chapter. Anything less, and future generations will be forever
short-changed.
There is no substantive way for the middle-serving building sector, left to its
own devices, to meet housing clients, needs individually, to do by itself what
ought to be directed through local government for communities of the future. The
inhabitants of most of these suburbs will inherit a particular consumer-durable
(their homes in their suburb) with a user span measured in lifetimes rather than
decades. And although landowners and contractors may be aware of the con-
temporary solo-parenting and single-household patterns, they are not of their own
accordabout to provide houses which break away from three-bedroom designs,262 Practice
The roll-over stage from
‘open area terrestrial
space’ to ‘urbanized
place’ is momentous in
the history of a
landscape’s evolution.
This is illustrated by our
fascination with the late
nineteenth-century
urban-embryo
photographs of the
townscapes still inhabited
today.