ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the ways that groups of generally middle-class people-planning, development, and human service professionals; environmental activists; and local residents-talked about Rouse Hill. Five major visions of good city form ran through the messages I collected from these groups during my fieldwork. I call these perspectives expansionists, developers, scientific environmentalists, local environmentalists, and consolidationists (see figure 6).In the context of often heated debates over growth, some ideas crystallized into frameworks or perspectives. An image of popular, inevitable, egalitarian suburban growth set the framework for the project in the 1960s. This framework remained important into the 1990s, being drawn on by public and private sector developers and some planners. In the 1990s, however, environmental concerns about sustainability and economic concerns about affordability provided alternative perspectives that started to slow and reshape the development. Low-density suburbs that had seemed natural and egalitarian began to seem environmentally and economically wasteful, at least to some.
