Smart growth

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Smart growth is a concept and term used by those who seek to identify a set of policies governing transportation and land use planning policy for urban areas that benefits communities and preserves the natural environment. Smart growth advocates land use patterns that are compact, transit-oriented, walkable, bicycle-friendly, and include mixed-use development with a range of housing choices. This philosophy keeps density concentrated in the center of a town or city, combating urban sprawl.

Proponents of smart growth advocate comprehensive planning to guide, design, develop, revitalize and build communities that: have a unique sense of community and place; preserve and enhance natural and cultural resources; equitably distribute the costs and benefits of development; expand the range of transportation, employment and housing choices; value long-range, regional considerations of sustainability over a short term focus; and promote public health and healthy communities.

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Elements of Smart Growth

Proponents of smart growth would typically view the following elements as important to the concept [1] [2]:

Because the contours of the smart growth concept are not universally agreed upon, implementation can be seen as a matter of degree rather than kind -- in other words, something is more "smart growth" if it includes many of the elements listed above, and is less "smart growth" if it contains fewer of them.

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Rationale for Smart Growth

Smart growth proponents see strong relationships between the policies described above and the outcomes smart growth seeks to achieve. For example, by locating people near each other, near jobs, and near shopping, travel time will be reduced and transportation infrastructure costs will fall. Likewise, by creating transit-oriented development, communities are seen to improve quality of life and encourage a heathier pedestrian-based lifestyle with less pollution.

Smart growth tries to take into consideration the total long-term economic costs of development decisions, rather than merely an aggregation of the short term profits that can be made by improving each individual parcel of land. For example, a person wishing to convert a farm 20 kilometers outside a city center to an office building may profit from the increased rents, but the community may pay more in the long run if more roads, commuting time and pollution is generated by the distance of the office building from residents, stores, suppliers and customers.

Part of the reason for the emergence of the smart growth concept in urban planning comes from changes in they way people view costs and benefits of development. Engineers often resort to life-cycle cost analysis to evaluate trade-offs while investors and company proprietors can remain more interested in the "bottom line" of profitability. Without a new kind of analysis, it is possible that neither group would support proposed changes to land use planning policies unless they received clear and perhaps immediate financial benefit.

Smart growth principles challenge old assumptions in urban planning, such as the need for residents to use automobiles or to have detached houses. The idea of smart growth has grown in popularity as an alternative to urban sprawl, traffic congestion, disconnected neighborhoods, and urban decay. As such, policy-makers sometimes try to provide financial incentives to developers to encourage different land use choices, often in combination with changing legal prescriptions.

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Policy Tools Used to Achieve Smart Growth

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Zoning Ordinances

The most widely used tool for achieving smart growth is the local zoning law. Through zoning, new development can be restricted to specific areas, and additional density incentives can be offered for brownfield and greyfield land. Zoning can also reduce the minimum amount of parking required to be built with new development, and can be used to require set-asides for parks and other community amenities.

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Environmental Impact Assessments

One popular approach to assist in smart growth in democratic countries is for law-makers to require prospective developers to prepare environmental impact assessments of their plans as a condition for state and/or local governments to give them permission to build their buildings. These reports often indicate how significant impacts generated by the development will be mitigated - the cost of which is usually paid by the developer. These assessments are frequently controversial. Conservationists, neighborhood advocacy groups and NIMBYs are often skeptical about such impact reports, even when they are prepared by independent agencies and subsequently approved by the decision makers rather than the promoters. Conversely, developers will sometimes strongly resist being required to implement the mitigation measures required by the local government as they may be quite costly.

A typical outcome in a community governed by those advocating smart growth is that developers will comply with the required measures, since building the community's trust over the long term through open dialogue is also in their long term interest and may help in recruiting and retaining staff, investors and perhaps customers with a genuine interest in social and environmental quality.

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Examples of Communities Implementing Smart Growth Principles

The following communities are among those to have received formal recognition by smart growth advocates and government agencies as having successfully implemented smart growth principles.[3]

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History

In the early 1970s, transportation and community planners begin to promote the idea of compact cities and communities. Architect Peter Calthorpe then popularized and promoted the idea of urban villages that relied on public mass transportation, walking and cycling instead of automobile use. Another architect named Andrés Duany then promoted the idea of changing design codes to promote a sense of community and to discourage driving. Colin Buchanan and Stephen Plowden helped to lead the debate in the United Kingdom. The sheer cost and difficulty of acquiring land (particularly in historic and/or areas designated as conservancies) for the purpose of building and widening highways caused some politicians to have second thoughts about skewing all transport plans towards motor traffic. The United States Environmental Protection Agency suggests smart growth as a way to reduce air pollution. Politicians representing rural districts find the concept useful as a way of deterring in-migration and change to comparatively tranquil areas (that retain remnants of a pre-industrial age), even though their electorate may overwhelmingly depend on jobs located in towns and cities.

Some environmentalists who seek the protection of rural open space promote smart growth through the advocacy and defence of urban-growth boundaries, or Green belts as they have been termed in England since the 1930s. Big-city mayors, downtown business groups, and individual investors interested in gentrification who wish to reverse urban decay often see smart growth or regeneration as a useful tool to revitalize town centers or neglected neighborhoods without perceived harmful impacts upon social conditions or valued environmental assets.

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Criticisms of smart growth

Although smart growth is the currently growing trend in many industrialized nations, not all groups are convinced of its benefits. Some find the phrase "smart growth" to be condescending and object to its implication that alternative strategies are inherently foolish or "un-smart". There is debate about whether transit-proximate development constitutes smart growth when it is not transit-oriented. Also, some lobby groups, such as the National Motorists Association[4], do not object to smart growth as a whole but strongly object to certain components traditionally associated with it, such as traffic calming or some other tactics intended to reduce automobile usage.

Libertarian groups, such as the Cato Institute, criticize smart growth on the grounds that while well-intentioned, its application has resulted in greatly increased land values to the point where detached houses are no longer affordable to people with average incomes. A detailed commentary by Randal O'Toole can be found here. (link to PDF file) Smart growth proponents might respond that detached houses should in fact be priced at a level reflecting their full environmental and social costs.

Wendell Cox is a vocal lobbyist against smart growth. He put analysis on smart growth forward to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, arguing that "Smart growth strategies tend to intensify the very problems they are purported to solve." The data he uses for his arguments can be found here. Cox was joined by Joshua Utt in writing an essay with analysis of Smart Growth and sprawl. In it, they argued the following:

Our analysis indicates that the Current Urban Planning Assumptions are of virtually no value in predicting local government expenditures per capita. The lowest local government expenditures per capita are not in the higher density, slower growing, and older municipalities. On the contrary, the actual data indicate that the lowest expenditures per capita tend to be in medium- and lower-density municipalities (though not the lowest density); medium- and faster-growing municipalities; and newer municipalities. This is after 50 years of unprecedented urban decentralization, which seems to be more than enough time to have developed the purported urban sprawl-related higher local government expenditures. It seems unlikely that the higher expenditures that did not develop due to sprawl in the last 50 years will evolve in the next 20--despite predictions to the contrary in The Costs of Sprawl--2000 research. It seems much more likely that the differences in municipal expenditures per capita are the result of political, rather than economic factors, especially the influence of special interests.

Cox has been variously accused of being on the bankroll of lobby groups for the automobile and construction industries.

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See also

Related Topics

Organizations

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External links

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