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Rod Burgess
In all of these efforts emphasis has been placed on the close integration of
transport and land use planning, the use of a wide a range of physical and socioeconomic
planning instruments to discourage car use and a range of architectural
and design practices to encourage the greater harmonisation of the built
environment with the natural environment.
Many of these policies have had a considerable effect in achieving transport
energy savings, improved building and urban energy efficiency, better access to
nature and green space, and social and aesthetic improvements. But there have also
been concerns about a number of problems created or ignored by the models. These
include: the effects of high-rise buildings on air pollution and the urban heat island;
the effect of linear and corridor development on property values; the continued lowdensity
suburbanisation of the middle class (often in the form of gated communities);
the limited effect of these policies on rates of crime and violence in inner-city areas;
the increased privatisation and commodification of public space; and the inability
of public investment to keep up with urban development.
Settlement systems
It has also been increasingly accepted in developing countries that the most
appropriate scale for achieving the sustainability goals associated with compaction
is the regional and metropolitan region level. Interest has focused on regional
development frameworks, on large scale and beaded linear cities, ‘concentrated
decentralisation’ models, and cellular and networked systems of cities linked by
transport and development corridors based on efficient and eco-friendly public
transport systems. It is only at this scale that the goals of a balanced integration of
settlement systems with nature (Atkinson, 1992), easy access to green environments,
the conservation of rural and agricultural land, spatial equity in infrastructure and
service provision and the avoidance of the spatial displacement of environmental
externalities can be realised. However, the translation of these concepts into practice
has rarely been achieved, for three reasons.
First, there has been the general hostility of neo-liberal development strategies
to metropolitan and regional level planning. In the 1960s there were concerted
interventionist attempts to check ever-widening regional inequalities through the
creation of ‘regional growth centres and poles’ (Perroux, 1971; Friedmann, 1966)
and in the 1970s the theory of ‘polarisation reversal’ identified regional
convergence as being achievable by promoting the growth of secondary cities
(Richardson, 1980). With the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980s, however, there
was a strong shift in the focus of spatial planning: now it was the ‘city in itself’
rather than regional or national urban systems that was identified as the locus of
productive activities. This shift led to the demise of regional planning and
explicit spatial decentralisation policies and the rise of urban policy narrowly
defined on the single-city model. In a climate of increased international
competition associated with export-oriented development, neo-liberal
policymakers argued that it was unwise to disturb the market determination of the
relationship between location and economic activity by government regulation.
Indeed, attempts to do so could slow the rate of national growth and exacerbate
regional inequalities. Planning should facilitate national economic growth and
gains in inter-personal equity, rather than being concerned with misguided
attempts to achieve convergence of regional incomes and service provision.
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