Housing in suburban settlements may be too widely spaced for genuine community development, too demanding of extended and thus expensive services, too wasteful of land and too sprawling to permit any real safeguarding of open space or providing of sufficient areas of recreation. These problems are at present a phenomenon of industrial society; but public policy confronts similar difficulties of over-extended services, access to work and potential sprawl, in the planning and upgrading of fringe communities around new cities in the developing countries.