Sustainable Urban Planning

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Parallel to the ‘base and residentiary’ model is the categorization of the labour
force two ways – there are the ‘transformers’ who produce the goods and serv-
ices which society obtains utility from, and the ‘transactors’ who mediate and
manage the producers of goods and services. The unemployed, the criminally
engaged, general administrators, and data processors are also transactors; and as
a rule of thumb, when transaction salary outlays relative to transformation salary
outlays exceeds 1.0 (and also when the number of transaction workers exceeds
the number of transformation workers) a sub-economy can be judged to be
running inefficiently.
What supercharges the ‘economic multiplier dynamic’ is reinvestment and
respending within a region. This of course relies on trading outcomes which
produce profits. Such an outcome is facilitated by a frictionless, openly helpful
administration which assists both ‘basic’ and ‘residentiary’ expansion, principally
by going all out for the multiplier benefits of export job creation. Each growth
pattern is unique and presents opportunities to expand ‘basic exports’ in ways
that are specific to its community of concern, even if this is not always so good
for the nation. Furthermore every region is a collection of overlapping sub-
regions, a multiplicity of services, a host of manufactures, a mixture of govern-
ment and statutory agencies. It is from the ‘export base’ – which includes tourism



  • that regional earning and spending growth dynamics arise, which is why the
    multiplier benefits of ‘export base’ employment is the harbinger of effective
    growth pattern management.
    Problems arise when the ‘export basis’ involves ‘finite’
    resources and a repatriation of profits arising from exploitations
    of the oil-minerals-gas kind; and even more visibly so with the
    exploitation of virtually ‘non-renewable’ living resources (such as
    indigenous forests and soils) for the short-term asset-stripping
    and employment opportunities provided. What has to be
    weighed up are gains over the short term from the extraction of
    ‘resource capital’ in the form of minerals, fossil fuels, and milled
    timber, against the longer-reach incremental gains from living off
    the ‘resource interest’ as, for instance, with tourism, selective
    indigenous forest logging, and production from fertile soils. This
    weighing-up defines a central principle of conservancy with
    development, living ‘sustainably’ from the natural ‘resource
    interest’.
    The call is for an ‘associationist’ approach which is mutually
    self-interested, particularly in relation to collaborative project for-
    mulation and design. The enrichment of life – the ‘variety’ objec-
    tive – is of course more complex than problem-solving can
    address. It is bound up with the expansion of access to scenic
    resources and heritage sites, andthe introduction of production
    opportunities, and the enhancement of social services. By these
    criteria, growth pattern development focuses on contributions to
    the material worth and variety of life, with ‘enrichment of variety’
    involving a wide array of production and recreational options.


Growth Pattern Management 123

One ‘associationist’
procedure is to consider
policy and design in a
collegiate atmosphere
on the understanding
that the multiple
generation of ideas from
several people is more
productive than an
individual effort. Another
approach is heuristic
reasoning: the
movement toward a
solution by trial and
error (trial and test)
which in its ultimate
sophistication morphs
into the Delphi
Technique whereby
successive rounds of
open discussion,
followed by closed
voting, moves thinking in
a lineal way towards a
supposedly optimal
option. Gaming
simulation, popular in
planning education, is a
further tool in the
‘associationist’ locker.
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