Yesterday I gave a presentation at a World Bank workshop in Pretoria on urban spatial structure and housing (yeah, I'm a lucky SOB). My job was to talk about successful models of housing development for low income workers, and I gave praise to the evolution of housing development in Hong Kong, Singapore and the post WWII United States. No one complained about the first two examples, but a planner complained that I would praise "sprawl" development.
But the fact is that houses in places like the Levittowns offered veterans returning home from war inexpensive, sanitary housing that could be modified and upgraded as their incomes rose. Density patterns in South Africa are also more similar to the largest American cities than to East Asian cities, and I met a group of women who were developing detached single family 40 square meter houses for around $4000 in construction costs, so to rule the detached house model out of hand does not make sense to me. I do think some Americans are needlessly fearful of density at times, but there is nothing wrong per se with constructing lower density houses in places with relatively ample land. And the snobbery some planning types show toward suburbs is just as disturbing to me as the fear some suburban types show toward dense cities.
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