Sustainable Urban Planning

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complexity, is one of incorporating this significant export base activity into the
within-region sequential spiral (figure 4.1).


Aesthetics. The aesthetic context, relative to the tourism enterprise, introduces
considerations of profiteering and culture-impact, also examined next in a tourism
passage. Aesthetic contradictions abound. One view is that tract forests, particu-
larlypinus radiata, are dark and satanic, which needs to be set against the counter-
argument for soil retention and profitable productiveness. There is a further
aesthetic and soil erosion complication in that at harvest time agro-forests in the
New World are usually clear-felled (clear-cut), the contra-indication being to
execute pre-planned area-felling (patchcuts), an adoption of the screening prac-
tices followed routinely at timber harvest time in the United Kingdom and Scan-
dinavia. Pockets of patchcut felling during summer, fall or winter, affecting up to
half an area to be ultimately harvested, facilitates avian and small animal survival,
sustains the local microclimate, and can reduce soil erosion providedoperational
procedures are in place to ensure that the patchcutting principle is not scaled up
to masquerade as clear-cutting in practice.
Cultural and aesthetic concerns are valid, and the adverse impacts can be
ameliorated in four procedural ways. First, by a patterning of the inter-cropped
trees with pasture and horticulture for rotational tree harvesting, thereby
softening and lessening the impact of commercial forestry. Second, accepting that
mono-silviculture for adequately rain-fed temperate climates can be visually
relieved, pines being supplemented with blackwoods, indigenous tree regenera-
tion, and Corsican pine inter-plantings, along with some macrocarpa, willow,
eucalyptus and Mexican cypress as is locally appropriate. Third, ensuring
that plantations are fitted into the local geomorphological structure, with the
engagement of landscape planning advice which softens hilltop profiles and
merges or contrasts the pastoral-silvicultural interface. Fourth, ensuring that
log-harvesting impacts are pre-considered, pre-planned and abated by adopting
patchcut practices, and that harvesting is followed through with a ‘clean-up green-
up’ regeneration and replanting programme. The overall objective is to maintain
viable farm-sized agricultural units taxed at rural rates, rural-only zoned to ensure
exclusive farming, and to inhibit non-farmbuilding activity on a non-variance
basis.^34


These observations on agricultural and forestry profile concerns
about the longer-term absence of viability for mono-agriculture,
and embody a pragmatic sustainable intent for ‘agriculture with
forestry’ and various other mixed-farm combinations involving
viticulture, horticulture and orcharding.


Tourism


Tourism has an impact upon urban services, accommodation, and the built her-
itage as well as the open-area landscapes and waterscapes. It is a major economic


Growth Pattern Management 169

The dominant emphasis
in this passage has been
with the physical aspects
of agriculture and
forestry. Insights into the
social needs of rural
communities is provided
by Jean Richardson,
Partnerships in
Communities, 2000.
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