This is sought through containment, complemented by an urban
corridor expansion component, accommodating the release of
urban pressure in ‘chunks’ rather than in bands. This accommo-
dation is essential (Weitz and Moore 1998) because ‘UGBs are
unlikely to keep development from leapfrogging when (urban-
rural) boundaries are impermanent’. However, a problem with
corridor expansion, highlighted by Barnett in The Fractured
Metropolis(1995) is that it aids and abets ‘a new kind of city, where
residential subdivisions extend for miles and shopping malls
and office parks are strung out in long corridors of commercial
development’.
The UGB understanding and emphasis arose in Oregon (where
urban-regional growth management has had marked success)
as an economic-aesthetic imposition applied to either side of the
urban fence. It is a residential growth management objective to
nurture ever-sustainable food and fibre production from the rural
landscape, coupled with an induction of improved livability
within a more diversified and densified urban area. DeGrove’s
perspective (1984: 235) is that ‘The process is a top-to-bottom and
bottom-to-top effort which, in conceptual terms at least, is
complete, rational, and comprehensive’. This has been further
elaborated (DeGrove and Miness 1992) as a ‘calculated effort
by a local government, region or state to achieve a balance
between natural systems – land air and water (conservancy) – and
residential commercial and industrial development’. With
regional growth management locked on, for reasons of ‘economy
sociability and livability’, this calls into being arguments in
favour of urban densification and diversification (infilling and
layering).Although the historical connections sourced for this text are
mostly from within Australasia and North America, it is the
outcomes of rural landscape management in the United
Kingdom, including rural and urban separation and contain-
ment, which is of indicative value to the Anglo New World
context.
With the exception of some outlier situations the contempo-
rary level of regional consciousness in the British Isles is socially
and geographically distinctive, boosted by a notable growth in
regional identity following the EEC–EC generation of support
policies for ‘target’ regions of need. The terra psyche of most
British Isles populations reaches back to a separateness of
function and identity between town and country, coupled to an effective locked-
on anti-sprawl rural planning technique. Not to be overlooked is the long-term
‘village’ presence which provides British peri-urban areas with a protectionist
lobby vector.158 Practice
The spatially
disaggregated support
area required for a
settler society city has
been calculated, for
Vancouver, as an
‘ecological footprint’ 180
times greater than the
area that city occupies.
Wackernagel and Rees,
1996.
Consult also the wider
polemic advanced
against urban sprawl in
Eban Fodor’s,Better Not
Bigger(1999).‘The suburban
developments of today
and the shopping smarm
that clutters up so much
of the landscape in
between them, arose
from the idea...that
neither the city nor the
country was really a
suitable place to live.’
The Geography of
Nowhere, James Kunstler,
1993The Queensland
Regional Planning
Advisory Group
definition (1994) of
‘growth management’
posits growth
management as seeking
‘to redistribute growth
and development in
ways that minimise
negative environmental
or social impacts while
achieving the maximum
efficiency in the
provision of services and
infrastructure for the
growing population’.