Urban Growth Management 221Water’s edge urbanization
(Refer also to the Coastal Zone Pattern passage in chapter 4)
Turn now the inquiring eye
To the sea’s margin,
To the land’s rough edge.
(Dennis Glover,Enter Without Knocking)The conservancy and development issues which confront the ecologically fragile
marine and lakeland shores – the marine, lake and river littoral – involves cul-
tural heritage as well as the more tangible preservation
of natural heritage and matters of biologically diversity.
The chapter 4 (figure 4.5) depiction of the coastal
marine zone illustrates the overall conservancy and
development context of coastal regimes. The intrinsic
worth of these environments includes sea food supply,
visual and aesthetic appeal, transportation connections,
recreational qualities, and historical associations, a fun-
damental terra psyche(box 1.2) for indigenous people,
and a landfall symbolismto settlers. There is more at
stake here than biological diversity, land protection,
and silt and waste-water absorption. Water’s edge
management and the management of other extensive
water-land uses are best mandated within a growth
management (extensive land-use protection) context, as
detailed in the previous chapter.
Two questions: ‘what is the coastal attraction?’ and
‘in what way is this an urban issue’. The ‘attraction’ is
associated with the potential to gratify two base needs
at the water’s edge: to gain access to a place which
offers the recreational cleanliness and sense of purifica-
tion human beings associate with proximity to ocean
and lake water; and to gain access to a food source of
particular significance to indigenous first peoples. The
‘in what way is this an urban issue?’ is a function of
landownership pressure up to the water’s edge, and
automobile mobility, combining to facilitate an exten-
sive urbanization along the shoreline, even the remote
shoreline.^39 Being close to the water is one compulsion,
occupying and fencing the land as close to that edge as
is legally allowable, is another.^40 These two factor-forces
are embodied in the waterside holiday cottage, in the past absorbing all the waste
materials, building-merchant ‘special offer’ leftovers and paints, and the limited
Bay of Plenty!