farming land takes place. Then there is the extravagance of wastefully large
(under-utilized) residential sections; the extravagance of one- and two-person
households in three- and four-bedroom housing; and the high cost of long-
run utilities and water-borne sewerage and storm water disposal services.- Consider finally the physiological costs arising in low-density areas from
the effects of toxins used in construction (such as formaldehyde and
polyurethane), in housework (cleaning and pesticide chemicals), and in the
garden (insecticides herbicides and fungicides). To these must be added the
repair costs related to automobile usage – noise pollution, fume pollution, and
other environmental impacts.
The greatest failings are the separation of urban functions (includ-
ing multiple housing zones), lack of attention to basic community
needs, failure to green-link and community-focus neighbour-
hoods,and the action of contractors to minimize their con-
tributions to the public realm. This is a situation which most
commentators observe as regressive in terms of community pop-
ulations and the built form delivered to them. It is easy to blame
these unbalanced outcomes on the subdivider-developer, when
from their perspective they pick up land titles as would any other
buy-and-sell speculator, with a view to adding value and maxi-
mizing their return at the quickest fiscal velocity possible. If the
outcomes are unfocused, car-dominated, lacking in green accessways and com-
munity facilities, they would argue that the ‘blame’ ought to be placed with local
administrations first, and maybe planning incompetence second.
The genesis of suburban conformity and social problems can be sheeted home
to the providers, those landowner, home-developer and local government per-
sonnel and politicians who, along with the vehicle manufacturing industry, and
the beverage food and durable gadget industries, engineer and telecast it this way.
Can we alter this conformity and the problematic list of ‘costs’ it generates? Not
easily: although it is practical to ‘work through’ an improved pattern of variety
and choice for greenfield suburbanization, and ‘work around’ the retrofitting of
extant suburbia to attain a compaction which is well designed, carefully con-
structed and sociable. This cost-consciousness is identified, increasingly, with
comments from the social welfare and security services, the medical and welfare
emergency services, and the police, fire and ambulance agencies: those whose job
it is to pick up the pieces and to console and band-aid the broken
lives and attend to community disorder in suburbia.Throughout antipodean cities and larger towns there exists a
home-builder handy-person commercial chain, supplying to the
community as place-makers. From their mega stores women and
men receive advice and take home materials for paving their
patios, building barbecues, and for painting, planting, trimming,
treating and generally adding lustre to their dream houses, yards
and gardens. What has taken place in settler society cities and200 Practice
Aucklander’s (circa1.1 m
pop.) often point out to
visitors, with confused
pride, that the territorial
extent of their city is
much the same as urban
London, neglecting to
note that it replicates
the lost in space low
gross density of Los
Angeles.‘Place-making based on
exclusion, sameness or
nostalgia is socially
poisonous and
psychologically useless: a
(person) weighted with
insufficiencies cannot lift
that burden by a retreat
into fantasy.’
Richard Sennett, 1995.