activities) remain part of the rural scene. Small-town issues are addressed in the
next passage.
A significant offshoot to ex-urban control policies involves recognition of the pref-
erence by indigenous first-settler peoples to settle down residentially upon cog-
natic owned peri-urban land for their own use on a community housing basis.^31
It is axiomatic that indigenous first-people settlements be required to meet the
normal user costs of access and utilities provisioning, but with no application, in
this context, of anything like a sprawl levy. The social issues involved are complex,
but there is one certainty: that it is the right of indigenous first-nation peoples to
exercise their preference, as an exceptional community value-set to reside within
ex-urbia on a cognatic title if this is their inclination, or be provided with an accept-
able exchange alternative.
A concluding emphatic point to make about ex-urban policy enforcement is
that in order for it to really work it must be locked on comprehensively, as a com-
plete package, throughout a whole territorial jurisdiction – the ‘concurrency’ and
‘consistency’ imperatives outlined in the previous chapter. Territorial plans which
set out to enforce growth management must designate and specify separately for
‘urban’ and ‘rural’ land-use allocations throughout the whole territorial extent of
a local-regional government jurisdiction. A consequence, following an effective
lock-on of a rural-urban growth boundary, is that at the ‘urban fence’ the rural-
side land values of the open-land areas only appreciate by some 10 to 15 per cent,
which is much less than the valuation hike arising from the standard rural-into-
urban expectation. Clarity of urban-rural distinction results in regional gains –
reduced fossil energy consumption, better-quality local food availability, and
constrains commodification of ex-urban landscapes against the state (provincial)
and national interest.
In the greater metropolitan growth context it has to be accepted that accom-
modation of new households cannot be contained forever on an inward densifi-
cation basis. It is an aspect of urban growth that cities be provided with some
greenfield opportunities to ‘let out the urban belt’ in a planned and provisioned
manner, and in pre-planned directions. This growth vector or corridor – for such
it usually is – became a feature of the Doxiadis designs of the 1960s and 1970s of
which I had personal experience at Tema (Ghana) and Islamabad (Pakistan), con-
cluding that as automobile-friendly designs they exhibited some validity for com-
munities of wealth, although they proved inconvenient for poorer people in those
developing nation contexts.^32
Small-town conservation with development
Small towns^33 have problems – sometimes remoteness, sometimes an abandoned
mining logging or service-centre legacy, always economic insignificance and
under-employment, often poverty. Yet they also exhibit several virtues, not least
their compactness, accessibility, pedestrian scale, time-of-day friendliness, variety
of building size and style, and mixed plot usage.^34 There are few production jobs,
Urban Growth Management 217