24 A large proportion of the New World difficulties over suburbia, edge city, and ex-urbia
arises from omnidirectional opportunities for peripheral expansion. However these
open market choice situations are mandated againstin a few situations, notably the
north-west and the south-east United States: see the authoritative New Frontier for Land
Policy, John DeGrove and Deborah Miness, 1992.
25 On the outskirts of Australian and Californian cities there are lengthy dirt tracks
leading to residences lying within the heart of bushland, despite the known recurring
danger and threat of brushfires.
26 Kendig et al. also even-handedly depict an ‘estate-district zoning’, a rural land com-
modification charter for enabling rural landowners to commodify their ownership into
mansion-sized residential spreads, which I decided, selectively, to not make reference
to in the main text!
27 In contexts where local government authorities acknowledge selectively specified ex-
urban areas for future suburbia on some 20-year look ahead ‘capacity need’ basis, it is
also possible for them to impose ‘sprawl levies’ as a user pays surcharge, which can
be applied later to the purchase of amenity green spaces and the installation of
utilities. Of course quasi-urban lifestylers under interim ex-urban zoning should be
charged on a full service-cost basis for their low-density road installation and upkeep,
and for contributions to the cost of water supply installation, long-run dry rubbish col-
lection, and for low-density line-of-wire utility provisioning.
28 Writing from a country context, New Zealand, where neither ‘growth management’ or
‘conservation subdivision’ is much considered, might register my judgement pre-
sumptuous. Low densities and vast space offers some explanation for a tardiness of
best-practice take-up in New Zealand, yet Australia and Canada have vastly more
space – indeed the need for ‘growth management’ and-or ‘conservation subdivision’
is greater for New Zealand, considered as a smaller whole, than is the situation in the
other three Anglo settler societies. My homespun explanation is that for New Zealand
the lack of precedence for understanding is the consequence of a shorter settler history
(exemplified by the still prominent conflict between indigenous and exotic flora and
fauna) and this underscores a disregard for the damage being visited daily upon the
humanized environment by the booster troika of ‘landowners, developers and politi-
cians’. Another 100 years may induce sensitivity; but, by then, will the humanized rural
landscape be in a cherishable condition?
29 The Duncan and Duncan piece informatively contrasts wealthy Bedford Village with
adjoining low-income Mount Kisco, noting that this zoning pattern ‘effectively shifts
the burden of providing housing for the County onto less affluent and politically less
well-organised communities’.
30 The precedent was made legally respectable in the 1960s. Morton, Thom and Locker’s
Seacoast in the Seventies (1973) setting the scene for the 1980s and 1990s observes that:
‘Once subdivision into ten acre lots has taken place it has been difficult for county
councils to resist pressure to allow the land to be used for residential purposes and
further subdivided lots can usually be shown to be uneconomic as farming units. This
loop-hole has allowed land to be taken out of farming use prematurely, has contributed
to the unnecessary high valuation of other coastal farmland and has prejudiced the
success of local Council’s attempts to plan their districts rationally.’
31 Within New Zealand there exists a papakainga group housing system for rural Maori
comprising lower costing Euro-styled bungalow clusters; and in Australia the more
‘rustic’ yet socially more sensitive (sight-lined) ex-urban clusterings of Aboriginal ex-
urban settlement. I harbour a sense of, but no direct knowledge of, this need in North
American contexts. In the South African ‘townships’ and in the more populous low-292 Notes to pp. 211–17