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Because of the ubiquitous car, there are no
longer clearly defined areas of settlement. People can
live in one place, work in another, have friends and
family in a third to which they remain attached. A new
town, suburb or housing development can be built in
any place, as a pure speculation, by people who have
never had and will never have any regard for the locality.
Nor is it only individuals who are geographically mobile
in the modern world. Enterprises also find it easier
to move. In the last century factories and offices sucked
the population from the countrywide. Businesses now
control the redistribution of people on shorter and
shorter time scales coinciding with the ever shortening
lifespans of new commercial enterprises.
Such developments are not new, but the scale
of disturbance is unique. They can be traced back more
than a hundred years to the coming of the railways —
to the time when the conservation movement also began.
To what extent such changes are to be accepted
or resisted is at the heart of stakeholder involvement
in community plans for sustainability. Ideally, every
community should be producing and running its own conservation
management plan to deal with the consequences of change.
This should target settlement, building types and shopping
facilities, the planning of urban and rural economies,
and the sentiments of community and locality which help
people to co-operate with their neighbours. Above all,
a community plan should cultivate respect for the community
as an environment made by people who live there for
the uses of people yet to come. Conservation should
take place within a comprehensive view of settlement,
in which new uses of environment are attached to new
ways of living in it, and in which old elements and
ways of living are protected from needless decay.
Lines on Sustainability
is an information resource structured along a string
of communities from Swansea to Shrewsbury. It follows
the route of the Central Wales Line, a survival of the
first phase of mass transport. This line through mid
Wales to the English Borderlands, in concept and reality,
is a device for making comparisons between examples
of extreem rurality and urbanity in terms of the history
of particular communities and their reactions to demands
of sustainable development.
Lines on Sustainability |
