Urban Growth Management 215catchy title Sprawl Bustingmasking its serious polemic, ‘mandate designer’ Jerry
Weitz (1999) reviews the learning paths and establishment successes acquired
from beneficial growth management practice in the Pacific north-west and the
Atlantic south-east of the United States. Newcomers to growth management prac-
tice have this precedent available, guidelining this multi-task, multi-year, multi-
agency and geographically extensive procedure. The longer-term expectation is
that growth management practice will evolve for all four Anglo settler society
nations as a consequence of a maturity of outlook that time engenders.
Ex-urban siting criteria have been represented by Kendig et al. in Performance
Zoning(1980) in a variety of ‘exception designations’ agricultural-district zoning,
urban-rural district zoning, and conservation-district zoning, to be applied on a
performance basis as is variously appropriate for rougher terrains and poorer soil
localities.^26 These zonings accommodate some housing in peri-urban localities,
with a spot-zone allowance for selected medium-density residential pockets on
agriculturally insignificant soils, ensuring rural-only land usage for elite-soil
landscapes.^27 This approach accommodates an inevitability, for some residential
accommodation on non-productive open lands, conserving the best land for
agriculture while also preserving the rural aesthetic comprising woodlands,
meadows, plantations, orchards, ponds, streams, wetlands, outcrops and vistas.
A format for breaking away from the ‘by right’ infilling of a rural landscape is
depicted in figure 5.7 as Trading rights for open space: the aim being to allow
only farm-buildings on farmland, in exchange for occasional, discrete, rural-
residential pockets on land of less farming utility, with the balance acreage secured
for farming or conservation.
In Randall Arendt’s Growing Greener(1999, also his Conservation Design for
Subdivisions, 1996) the slant is ‘conservation subdivision’, a four-step design
Figure 5.7 Trading rights for open space.
On the leftsmall ‘broad-acre’ plots presenting as suburbia in the countryside. To the righta com-
promise; the same number of plots andsome reserved woodland,plusthe fertile area retained for
agriculture.