Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [59]
The reasons behind this common sequence of events are economic. Growth moratoriums eventually create such a scarcity of real estate that prices become severely inflated. Meanwhile, the potential profit to be made on new development grows so high that the building industry is motivated to mount a huge lobbying effort, which seems justified by the housing shortage. Such political pressure is difficult for public servants to ignore.
Acknowledging the inevitability of growth leads to a further admission, that growth is a problem whose solution must be shared by multiple jurisdictions. Metropolitan growth nowadays is typically accompanied by the loss of population, jobs, and tax income in the core city. The social inequity that results from separating new development from old deterioration can be addressed only by governments working in concert. Since governments prefer absolute political autonomy, there is little motivation for them to do so.
2. Establish a permanent Countryside Preserve. One of the most disastrous consequences of sprawl is the way that it consumes the farmlands and wilderness surrounding populated areas. Cities and towns that were once able to satisfy their food needs locally no longer can; indeed, a brief breakdown in our transportation infrastructure would quickly demonstrate how far we have drifted from self-sufficiency Similarly, most American cities once provided their citizens with easy access to nature, but ever-greater efforts are becoming necessary to escape the urban envelope. In his books of near-future science fiction, William Gibson refers to BAMA, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, an uninterrupted carpet of sprawl. Trends suggest that such an outcome is quite possible.
The preferred technique for preserving countryside is the Urban Growth Boundary: a line defining the edge of the metropolis, most famously employed in Portland, Oregon. While these boundaries have sometimes proved effective, they are rarely a long-term solution. Political pressure forces them outward eventually—even Portland’s lauded boundary faces constant legislative challenges.bx A more realistic technique is the Countryside Preserve, which sets aside multiple parcels of conservation land independent of their relationship to the center city. Unlike the Urban Growth Boundary, the Countryside Preserve is drawn using objective environmental criteria, and therefore is not as susceptible to the development pressure straining against a typically arbitrary edge. It is effectively a rural boundary, drawn on the basis of criteria that can stand up in a court of law. Areas to be designated as permanent countryside include waterways and other wetlands, habitat for endangered species and communities of species, forests and large woodlots, steep slopes, cultural resources, scenic areas, view-sheds for highways, agricultural land,by and current and future parks. If at all possible, the Countryside Preserve should form continuous greenbelts to best accommodate wildlife mobility requirements. A Countryside Preserve line will probably end up looking different from an Urban Growth Boundary line, since it will be drawn according to the demands of the terrain. The environmentalist Benton MacKaye described such countryside preserves as “dams and levees for controlling the metropolitan flood,”2 and argued that these green areas should penetrate deeply into the city to be integrated with its urban park system, as they do in Washington’s Rock Creek Park.
3. Establish a temporary Countryside Reserve. Unlike the permanent countryside, the Countryside Reserve is available for future high-quality development, when such development is justified. It consists largely of fields, pastures, and small