ABSTRACT
It is important to stress that the pressure for new out-of-town housing not only results from recent household formation rates, but also reflects a longstanding drift of the population away from the inner urban areas. Growing personal mobility, associated particularly with car ownership, increased personal wealth, plus a combination of dissatisfaction with urban living and a search for something approximating to the ‘rural idyll’ all made a contribution to this population drift. It is difficult to summarise adequately the many factors at work here. Sometimes it was simply a long-standing life-cycle pattern, of young families seeking out suburban houses with gardens, but often it was linked to wider issues such as the quality of schools in urban areas and differences in house price trajectories, which in some cases were enmeshed in wider issues of racial stereotyping and discrimination. Again, competitive local planning sometimes played a part, as local authorities in some areas felt compelled to provide planning permission for new housing on their peripheries, for fear that people would simply move out to adjacent areas and commute back into their jobs. Moreover, the continuing voluntary outward drift of people from the cities is used by some of those seeking to justify alternatives to compact city solutions, from edge-of-town development to new settlements. For instance, the TCPA argued that ‘the fact that counter-urbanisation has been occurring in the UK in recent years displays people’s preferences for non-city living’ (TCPA in written evidence to the South West public examination, 2000).
