| Smart Growth
Smart growth is an urban planning and transportation theory that concentrates growth in the center of a city to avoid the sprawl that develops through general growth planning; and advocates compact transportation friendly land use, including neighborhood schools, streets that work for everyone, and mixed use developments with a range of housing choices.
Smart growth places greater value on long-range, regional considerations of sustainability over a short-term focus. Its goals are to achieve a unique sense of community and place; expand the range of transportation, employment, and housing choices; equitably distribute the costs and benefits of development; preserve and enhance natural and cultural resources; and promote public health. Transportation and community planners began to promote this idea of more compact cities and communities in the early 1970s. The cost and difficulty of acquiring land (particularly in historic and/or areas designated as conservancies) to continue to build and widen highways to service ever expanding communities caused some metropolitan areas to reconsider basing their communities on the automobile and instead are attempting through Smart Growth initiatives to bring back more pedestrian friendly/cost effective neighborhoods.
A wonderfully informative paper written by Tasha Harmon for the Institute for Community Economics can be found on ICE’s web site at: http://www.iceclt.org/resources.html
Integrating Social Equity and Growth Management: Linking Community Land Trusts and Smart Growth. The full document can also be downloaded from KnowledgePlex at:
http://content.knowledgeplex.org/kp2/cache/documents/98053.pdf
“Critics of growth management often charge that smart growth strategies drive up housing prices and are therefore bad for low- and moderate-income people. While there is some merit to this criticism of existing growth management efforts, it is also true that sprawl and unplanned growth are even more detrimental to low-income people and to the preservation of diverse neighborhoods. And, there are tools that can be incorporated into smart growth strategies that will make the housing in these communities affordable to low- and moderate-income people. The community land trust is one such tool.” - Excerpt from: Integrating Social Equity and Growth Management: Linking Community Land Trusts and Smart Growth by Tasha Harmon. |
