‘This is a wonderful book that should be on the desk of every architect and planner. It shows how

Isn’t urban consolidation ultimately the only way to stop sprawl though?
To work well, consolidation requires eco-logical design. Some dense urban developments actually 
consume more land area than some lower density counterparts due to poor site planning (eg wasteful 
parking and road layouts). The real problem is that the dominant ‘solution’, consolidation, is still 
based on designing for the car instead of enhancing the ecology and community. In other words, the 
solution is seen as making it more 
inconvenient
for cars.
24
The focus on reducing distances through 
densification to the exclusion of other criteria (eg environmental goods, services and ecosystems, 
healthy materials, and urban agriculture) leads us to neglect making cities more self-sufficient, safe 
and secure. For example, one of the premises underlying arguments for compact urban form is that 
making car travel less necessary or convenient will reduce total fuel consumption. But this excludes 
from consideration:
•
Effects on other kinds of transport, such as an increase in trucking for bringing in food 
supplies and materials, and the difficulty of adding bus lanes
• 
Requirements for other land uses, such as recreational facilities (even sports fields) and large 
markets that urban residents may want to drive to 
• 
Other drivers of fuel consumption, such as the mechanical heating, cooling and ventilating
required by high-density construction 
• 
Other factors that are exacerbated by densification, such as the urban heat island and wind
tunnel effects, overshadowing and pollution
The sad reality that cars will rule in a market economy, tempered by the potential for fuel cell
cars or electric cars, and other improvements
25
But wasn’t it cars that created urban sprawl in the first place?
Yes. Suburbs were ‘designed’ for cars, and the problem should not be understated. Roads take up 
about a third of urban land.
26
The post-World War II spread of Australian cities was estimated to 
exceed a million hectares and cost several billion dollars annually.
27
In America, more people now 
live in suburbs than cities – despite the publicity that was given to the problems of sprawl in the 
1960s. But overall, cities as a whole only occupy about two per cent of land, so their ecological 
footprint is a bigger problem than their geographical spread [Chapter 8]. Suburban sprawl was a 
result of many kinds of design, not just that relating to cars. As John Thackara put it: “sprawl is the 
result of zoning laws designed by legislators, low-density buildings designed by developers, marketing 
strategies designed by ad agencies, tax breaks designed by economists, credit lines designed by banks, 
geomatics designed by retailers, data-mining software designed by hamburger chains, and automobiles 
designed by car designers.”
28
While compact cities may arguably increase the efficient use of fossil fuels for transport, they can also 
compete for space with ‘free’ passive solar energy or even solar cells. The source of energy is more 
important than the amount. There is an almost infinite amount of solar energy available for building 
heating, cooling and ventilating, although this has been made difficult to capture by past planning 

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51
Sustainable Urban Form
and design decisions.
29
Fossil fuels, on the other hand, are finite, costly and harmful at each stage of 
production, however efficiently they may be used, as detailed by Hermann Scheer.
30
The compound 
and cumulative impacts of hi-tech petrochemical forms of design are often not anticipated or intended 
[Box 26]. For example, catalytic converters reduce car emissions, but the palladium needed in their 
production generates acid rain. Low-tech can be far less risky.