Local communities, ecology, and planning 301which came from somewhere. I well remember days of moan-
ing flatbed trucks each carrying three full-length palms to Cel-
ebration, a process that converted a beautiful distant diverse
savanna into monotonous pastureland.
Plantings of street trees, front yards, and backyards in the
town are all determined by narrow lists of approved plants.
Everything outside seems rigorously manicured to fit a pre-
scribed appearance; randomness and surprises are kept out. The
controlling, regulated, ordered, homogenized, predictable, and
monotonous place helps select the residents, and then shape
thekind of lives they live. In some ways a ‘‘theme park,” extreme
Celebration highlights many unwelcome elements of planned
towns.
Planned-town experts can point to other places and other patterns, but would
generally agree that so far ecology has not been a major priority. Yet it could be.
Then planned towns, where nature and people both thrive long term, would be
clearly better than the two sprawl options and the existing planned-town option
presented at the outset. Until then, one must conclude that the present cases
(despite some unplanned ecological benefits) illustrate the typical ‘‘Nature gets
theleftovers” development approach. Ecological criteria are often little more
than open-space amenity or aesthetics, sometimes combined with stormwater
management. No rigorous scientific meaning or use of ecological principles or
standards or accountability exists. Ecology, environment, conservation, and habi-
tat are used in superficial generic ways, essentially as green marketing. Trans-
form that, and planned towns could be a significant solution across the land.
Suburban town
Open space (greenspace) planning and protection in Concord,
Massachusettshighlights three particularly useful insights for a community in its
region (Fergusonet al.1993,Formanet al.2004): (1) broad town-wide or landscape-
wide patterns for identifying land protection priorities; (2) a promising approach
forregional thinking and collaboration; and (3) dealing with the presence of a
major highway in the community. Concord is an outer Boston suburb with a
ruralfeel. Located 55 km northwest of downtown Boston on a commuter rail
line, the town has 17 000 residents in 67 km^2 (26 mi^2 ). A historic town where the
American Revolution began, it later became America’s nineteenth-century liter-
ary center where R. W. Emerson, L. M. Alcott, N. Hawthorne, and H. D. Thoreau
(one of the roots of ecology) lived. In 1928 the town was a pioneer in passing