Sustainable Urban Planning

largely social strictures which lie at the heart of concerns held by those now living,

influencing the small-family option. Secondthrough resource management, by

simply doing much better in the pursuit of day-to-day policies for overall

sustainable resource use.

The philosophy and science which characterized the first Malthusian round for

the Limits to Growth prognosis, 200 years ago, is nowan awesome technological

assertion clearly at work upon the globe considered as an earthship. For a con-

jectural style of confirmation, look again at box 3.3 which hazards a conservative

depiction of the twenty-first-century gap between remaining fossil-fuel energy

stocks and a projection of population increase.

The political ecology of scale shifts

Scale shift is a local, regional, national, and global phenomenon. The national

aspect of ‘shift’ is represented in figure 3.1 as Scale and economy. It took the

efforts of the Club of Rome [1972] – recalibrating from Malthus to Meadows – to

establish the obvious, that the planet itself, and the resources bound into it, were

finite. The global scale shifts in the degradation of rural producer landscapes and

growth in the size of urban consumer enclaves took place throughout the last

century at a much faster rate, and on a relatively more dramatic scale, than in any

previous century. And although it could be construed that putting together this

listing relies on the use of shorthand expressions to dramatize a pre-indicated

emphasis, it can also be held that it indicates clearly the scale of damage which

‘pace and change’ is dumping today onto states and communities, notably poor

states and poor communities.

96 Practice

Small-scale past Expansive scale present

‘First-people’ values ‘Settler’ values

For ‘group’ (community) For ‘self’ (individual)

Rural dispersed Urban concentrated

Stable population Growing population

Labour intensive Technology intensive

Pantheistic (with nature) Theistic (above nature)

‘Gift economy’past ‘Gain economy’present

Self-sufficient production Export-led trading

Every person productive Massive unemployment

Discrete projects Big enterprises

Community harmony Individual profit

‘Soft rustic’ technologies ‘Hard science’ technologies

Agriculturally based Industrially based

Production for satisfaction Consumption for status

Figure 3.1 Scale and economy: characteristics of change