California, flooding for major riverine settlements everywhere, hurricanes on the
weather shores of the south-eastern United States, salination crises and fresh-
water supply difficulties in urbanized areas bordering deserts, and an increasing
likelihood of electricity blackouts, sewage surcharges, storm-water blowouts,
traffic gridlocks and garbage mountains. Additional to the case for protecting
potential victims from being burnt out, blown away, shaken down, is the counter-
case for relieving the non-victim majority of the kinds of insurance payouts they
expected never to have visited upon them. The above-listed failings lend a feral
quality to much city, and particularly, suburban life. This suggests that the further
perpetuation of city expansion on land patently unsuitable for urban development
has to be slowed down, halted and reversed.
Existing suburbs are indeed cumbersome places, inordinately difficult to
change. Yet communities cannot afford to continue with the social damage as well
as the economic costs of their inefficiency. Indeed, because the
benefits are greater, and the costs less, there is every incentive –
not yet widely acknowledged – to make policy provisions and
affect good design for lesscar dependence, lesssingle-use zoning,
greaterhousing choice, higherhousing density, increasedland-use
variety, and morecommunity participation – anda proactive use
of the ‘deemed to comply’ principle for innovative and effective
design alternatives. An irony is that those who live in settler
societies know of, and have also often enjoyed, excellent urban
experiences and stimulating urban living elsewhere, especially
after visiting the European Old World. Despite this awareness,
settler societies persisted in the twentieth century with a monot-
onous and dysfunctional zoned-ahead pattern unsuited to the
particular needs of singleton, solo-parented and one-car house-
holds. It is a pattern predicated upon relative wealthiness, the 4.2 person housing
norm, discretionary access to the automobile, and rural-into-urban land com-
modification – the settler society ‘received inheritance’ and the Anglo New World
‘urban tradition’. That inheritance and tradition now cries out for repackaging.
The extant suburban and ex-urban style is dated and failing, exhibiting a need to
be retrofitted, committing to urban development which is in good balance with
nature, a social pleasure to live in, and economical to manage, albeit with some
tidy and tucked away (self-served) ex-urban residential living on rural landscapes
useless to agriculture.
Governments should act custodially if the cost of the way in which people live
is crime-burdened, drug-stalked, debilitating or debt-inducing, and do so for the
national benefit as a whole. Individuals would make more commitment to com-
munity affairs if there were alternatives to pawning their lives for a house and car
with little else in the way of human investment and interest. How? Through
avoidance of development onto known vulnerable sites – flood-prone, at fire risk,
eathquake-prone. By increasing the density of grey-zone suburbia, then tempting
people out of their cars, onto their bikes and on their feet. By providing user-
funded public transport; by reducing waste and applying recycling policies. By
capturing and using more solar energy in the home place, workplace and schools.
Urban Growth Management 261CURIBATA
The Curibata experience
in south-eastern Brazil
has synthesized solutions
to urban design,
education, information,
healing, safety and
economy.
An good explanation of
these innovations is given
in the popular Hawken,
Lovins, Lovins text
Natural Capitalism, 1999.