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Smart Growth

“Smart growth” refers to a new way of thinking about how communities, cities, towns, and entire metropolitan regions grow and develop. According to this new way of thought, current patterns of growth and decline are harmful to communities; they undermine urban economies and broader environmental objectives and exacerbate deep racial, ethnic, and class divisions. These growth patterns, popularly referred to by the pejorative term “sprawl,” are not inevitable but rather are the result of major governmental policies that distort the market and facilitate the excessive decentralization of people and jobs.

Defining Smart Growth

The concept of smart growth is often broadly defined, but generally it refers to methods or a series of strategies intended to manage urban and suburban growth and development comprehensively, in a way that connects all people throughout a region to all the resources in that region; reduces land consumption; promotes transportation, housing, and land-use alternatives; and improves overall quality of life. Smart growth does not mean no growth, but rather the accommodation of growth in a way that considers its effects, both positive and negative.

Although some elements of the smart growth concept have been prevalent for more than a century, growing frustration with sprawling development patterns in recent decades has launched this new thinking into the American mainstream. Several other terms are used to describe concepts that are generally similar to smart growth: sustainable development, metropolitanism, growth management, regionalism, livable communities. The notion of smart growth is now commonly discussed among political, civic, and cultural leaders, as well as among developers and other participants in the real estate industry.

More frequently, however, the most vocal proponents of smart growth are ordinary citizens demanding that the market and the government change the way they do business and take action to curb sprawl, promote urban reinvestment, and build communities of quality and distinction. As a result, voters regularly approve measures to address the consequences of sprawling development patterns. Governors and states respond by proposing and enacting reforms in governance, land use, and infrastructure policies. Although smart growth is essentially a U.S. term and concept, it is based, in some respects, on development patterns that exists in other countries—such as those in Europe—that promote, for example, a mix of uses, orientation to transit, and a blend of housing types.

Emergence of Smart Growth

It is impossible to identify a specific date or time of origin for the smart growth movement, except that the concept developed during several decades as a reaction to development-related issues such as traffic congestion, loss of open space, and social inequity. Smart growth is commonly considered to be the antithesis of sprawl and a response to a widely felt loss of community in the United States today.

Smart growth has been championed in recent years by elected officials such as Maryland governor Parris Glendening, who initiated a series of reforms in his state, including the Smart Growth and Neighborhood Conservation program, which was initiated with landmark legislation passed in 1997. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Al Gore promoted his “livability agenda,” which aimed to preserve green spaces, ease traffic congestion, restore a sense of community, and enhance economic competitiveness. Since 1996, Earl Blumenauer, a member of Congress from Oregon, has led the fifty-member Livable Communities Task Force.

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