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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Wojtek asks me to do the maths. I have done the
maths for the UK, though not yet for the world.</FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>This is how it comes out. The Office for National
Statistics Land Use survey puts the built up part of the UK at ten per cent of
all land. Farming accounts for three-quarters of all land. Because of increasing
yields, around a third of the farm land is surplus to requirement, leading to
wholesale land retirement (usually effected by having it re-designated national
park, green belt or something similar).</FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>So you could conceivably double - and this is at
the outer limits, nobody wants or needs to double - the built up area of the UK
- and still reduce the undeveloped land by just one ninth.</FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Doug assumes that the reason that the suburbs were
built was to disaggregate the working class. That seems to be turning reality on
its head. The working class was disaggregated, by virtue of its political defeat
around the same time that tenure was shifting from rented city apartments to
suburban home-ownership. Consequently the political character of the
suburbs was more individuated aspirational than it was collective solidarity.
The picket fence does not fix capitalist values in the minds of working class
people, any more than does the shift from blue to white collars, or
does the decline in flat caps and wooden
clogs.</FONT> </DIV></BODY></HTML>