Besides regulation that governs products, the use of building materials is also affected by the rules that guide development and construction. As noted in Chapter I, this dissertation must eschew getting too deeply into urban design, since this is such a major topic in its own right. But here I cannot avoid at least a mention of the role of such large spatial design in materials efficiency. Suburban sprawl was, after all, a central (anti-)design element of the postwar Fordist Waste economy, providing effective demand for capitalist growth that had badly sagged in the decade before the war. North American suburbanization was what writer William James Kunstler (Greene, 2004; Kunstler, 1994) considers the greatest misallocation of material resources in human history. A recent study of Chicago and seven surrounding counties found that low-density development, as in the typical suburb, is around 2.5 times more materials-intensive per person than high-density development (Gardner & Sampat, 1998). Suburban development is incredibly expensive in real terms, but this has been hidden by a range of subsidies for infrastructure, roads, services and landin addition to the most basic subsidy of all: cheap dirty energy. Today, as the era of cheap oil is drawing to a close, the potential for savings through densification is actually greater than the Chicago study suggests if communities employ an ecological brand of intensificationfeaturing green roofs, urban agriculture, edible landscaping, natural wastewater treatment, live/work communities, and reclaiming space from cars for people and plants. Such a