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Wed 11 Apr, 2012 01:59 am
The great art of sophistry is to be entirely truthful in matter of fact and yet to distort all reality. This is particularly relevant to statistics. An average person would be awful to behold. Everyone in the world could stand arm in arm on the Isle of Wight, is a useless fact that merely appears to indicate how few people there are.
A recent statement by a building industry spokesman, is to the effect that only one tenth of the area of this country is developed, meaning ninth tenths is open country, and NIMBYs opposed to urban expansion should be ignored. I raises an image of a conurbation housing everyone with almost all the country empty.
A very different image is conveyed if the whole population were in sensible medium sized villages, with immediate access to the countryside around, as they should have. That means every square mile of this country would have a village occupying it. Imagine!
If we take past reality, every village had its manor and parish, and if the population grew beyond the capacity of that common farm, it starved. Today, the town has been almost totally divorced from the countryside, and people probably expect government to ensure that whatever population there is it is fed and has rural access.
Question? Is it more sensible and balanced, to view towns and villages as places that include countryside, and preferably around them. Recreation, nature, food, timber, and simply a real community.
It's probably sensible, but it doesn't seem to be how we're wired. People have wanted to be asclose to the bright lights and big city as they could get, ever since there have been lights and cities, which is something like 9000 years now. That's where the opportunity and excitement are, and that's where people want to go. As the WWI song says, "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, After they've seen Paree?"
You might want to look at the "Garden Cities" urban planning movement of the 20s and 30s. Somewhat the same ideals but not many ever bought into them. That's the problem. Also we have 5 or 10 times the population now that we used to have when most people lived on farms, and there's no place to put them. And farm work is HARD and doesn't pay that well. A lot of people get out of it as soon as it becomes possible.
It might help if you understand that this member is not interested in a conversation. He/she/it intends to pontificate, while remaining uninterested in what anyone else has to say.
Oh? I haven't encountered him/her before. If so, I'll do my best to cut them off at the knees and then leave. It's a topic I have some interest in. If they abuse it, I'll heap invective on them, following in your footsteps. If they don't, maybe I'll keep talking.
I can't state it for a fact, but i've never known this member to respond to any other member's posts.
@MontereyJack,
He seems to be a fan of uselless "urban spraw" an inefficient use of extra-urban lands to build housing custers. Each of these clusters then require connectivity to the urban centers and they aso demand infrastructure and services. Even though, mapwise, we appear to have sufficient land for "mixed use", common sense planning would recognize that there are better ways to develop areas by "infilling within the urban areas" or developing suburbs that are closest to the city or town.
Many local municipalities compete with each other to "Harvest" all the commercial (Read:TAX PRODUCING) properties while etting a single municipaity become the "bedroom community". Housing development actualy generates ESS tax base and demands more inservices than do commercial.
U of Wisconsin urban studies did several comoeing studies that showed that a typical "cookie cutter" deveopment generates more in service NEEDS than tax revenue by an amount of 27% demand over tax revenues.
I know that the author does often just post pet theories but even so, I feel that he is not correct in his assumptions about lnd deveopment in the US (maybe hes talking about UK , Im not sure where hes from)
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