ABSTRACT
Although Rouse Hill is a place to the north west of currently urbanized Sydney, the Rouse Hill Development Area was the creation of a formal planning process that has already spread across three decades. By transforming a group of farms, houses, and smallscale work places into a ‘Sector’ and then a ‘Development Area’, the formal planning processes focused attention away from the existing landscape and toward the changes that would occur in the area. It set the agenda both conceptually in terms of the shape of the development as a growth corridor, and literally in terms of the many formal meetings that occurred during the long planning process. Of course not everyone has to follow an agenda, particularly when it is set by someone else far in advance of the actual development and in a context of fairly rapid change. In Rouse Hill the agenda was increasingly questioned. These questions transformed suburban development from a social good into an environmental and economic problem, at least for some participants.
