nor are they in step with the need to set about the provision of a joyful enriching
and aesthetically refreshing urban lifestyle. To those landowners and developers
who manufacture suburbia the business risks for innovation are inertial. Changes
to the patterning and provisioning of middle suburbia, formerly matters of mere
rote for local government administrators, call for social as well as physical design
innovation on the part of technocrats, bureaucrats and politicians. These are the
people positioned to ensure that the identified needs and wishes of future
occupants are incorporated into future projects.
The point, the neomodern point, is that low-density wide-road subdivisions of
once-rural land into plots, houses and mean-and-marginal public open spaces has
run its relatively short and selective course in the transpacific (Anglo) New World.
Past patterns of dreary suburbanization has given rise to a recognition that con-
tractors and landowners and local government and central government (Federal
and State) must be part of the urban reform options and flexible actions outlined
in these pages. In broad effect: pre-design, pre-investment, and pre-development
- thus ‘pre-ensuring’ for towns and cities of the future:
- That the focus and form (sense of place) components are agreed and set in
place ahead of any necessary urban-fringe crossover from rural to urban
settlement. - That the mixture of up-coming generations in diverse households has housing
choices and varietal land-use choices, at higher densities. - That the supply of urban land be targeted withinextant settlements much
more than from the fixed and finite rural land resource. That an internal
consolidation-diversification-makeover is the governing focus. - That integrated public transport systems be justified and installed for higher-
density tracts, and for the use of non-driver persons, against the day when
profligate usage of private motor cars will become less practical as well as less
affordable. - That urban safety and security be addressed as a social need as well as a
practical necessity. - That green space ‘public realm’ components be pre-positioned to infiltrate
suburbs and to achieve identity for urban neighbourhoods. - That the level of local food and water provisioning and waste management,
locally managed and conserved energy waste-reduction and recycling, and the
panoply of sustainable-in-intent ideals, be ever improved upon and expanded.
Hope, incredible optimism, and the goodness of individuals, represents the ethos
of settler society urban communities. Government, particularly better local gov-
ernment in all that is urban and suburban, is the instrument of managed inter-
vention and strategic action. The challenge is to engage the minds of individuals
to work out attractive proposals with communities, and then to adhere to the ‘sus-
tainability paradigm’ for achieving balanced economic growth, social wellbeing
and environmental husbandry. That trinity encapsulates this book’s emphasis on
balance and flexibility; the key phrase being triple harmony, the keyword being
beingsustainability.
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