Sprawl, A Compact History, Part II: Fixed boundaries

I'm going to skip forward to chapter 8, "The First Anti-Sprawl Campaign: Britain" here, because it's what I'm currently actually reading.

Bruegmann quotes an earlier British writer, Clough Williams-Ellis, who was heavily anti-sprawl.

The true countryman will know the area is infected -- the Jones have
brought the blight of their town or suburb with them...

Bruegmann says in response:

This passage is drenched in class resentment. It seems clear that for
Williams-Ellis the "true countrymen" were members of the great landed
aristocracy of Britain who had controlled the bulk of the country's land since
the medieval period.

First off, I don't think it's wise for anyone not from Britain to be talking knowingly about British class resentment, which has always seemed to me (an outside observer) to be quite, ah, intricate. (I will say that Bruegmann's quote from Williams-Ellis is longer than the snippet I gave above.)

Secondly, I'm not sure "true countryman" was really intended to refer to the aristocracy. My impression is that the British make an ideal of the small, independent farmer just as we do in the U.S., irrespective of what the reality is today or in 1920.

Thirdly, Bruegmann is missing (or ignoring) what I think is Williams-Ellis' main point, which is the idea that there are clear boundaries between places and between types of places, and each type of place is supposed to contain certain types of people and things, and these boundaries shouldn't be breached. I think Williams-Ellis would be just as disturbed by someone building a large house on a half acre of land on a town square as he apparently is by someone building houses suitable for a town in the country. Now, class could very well be tied up with these ideas of what belongs where, but it's not just a class thing, I think.

In fact, I think this desire for clear boundaries between types of things is what drives a lot of anti-sprawl feeling (even if it's not included in the arguments people actually use when trying to convince other people), and Bruegmann, up through chapter 8 anyway, hasn't really mentioned this at all. He has derisively mentioned "aesthetic objections" to sprawl a couple of times without going into detail, and maybe that's what this counts as.

Is it okay to object to development that doesn't directly affect you because it goes against your internal model of what' s supposed to be where? Is the mere fact that one development pattern "feels right" to a lot of people (and thus presumably makes them a little happier) enough of a reason to enforce that pattern? It has to be kept in mind, of course, that what "feels right" to most people most of them time is what's already there, or what was there when they were young.

UPDATE: So, is what "feels right" to most people the maintenance of proper boundaries between things or what things were like when they were young? I seem to be pushing both.

Because the point of this particular post is "maintaining boundaries", that must be the correct answer. Please disregard the last sentence of the last paragraph of the original post. Although the status quo is an obvious starting point for anyone's idea of how things are supposed to be, I don't think it's really the only thing that matters in this particular case. 

¶ 1/11/2006 08:32:00 AM