If the blackmail and extortion still don't work, however, the developers have yet another weapon in their armoury. You and I would recognize it as bribery. Developers can offer as much money as they like to a local authority, to persuade it to accept their plans. The results of this democratic deficit are visible all over our cities. These developments characteristically generate huge amounts of traffic.
Affordable housing is pushed out into the countryside.
Communities lose the resources which hold them together. But, if this suspension of accountability is onerous in the towns, it is perhaps even more poignant in the countryside. Over the centuries, the concept of property has changed dramatically. Property was a matter of possessing rights in land or its resources, and there were few areas of land in which rights of some kind were not shared. Today it is the land itself which is called property, and the words for the rights we possessed have all but disappeared.