Whether or not you like suburbia, the first thing you notice about new suburbs is that they all seem to start with fences.
They don’t, of course. There are years of planning and resource consent hearings, followed by scraping back the topsoil and installing all the roads, pipes and services. Right at the end when it seems all is lost, the earth-moving equipment and trucks disappear, the grass is sown and the fences go up. It is only then that they begin to resemble what we have come to know as suburbia. Fences make them recognisable and, in this state, before all the houses are built, they are like ghost towns in reverse, full of potential and lives about to
