Smart Growth and the Limits to Growth: An Irreconcilable Contradiction?

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Smart Growth – A Worthwhile Cause?

I'd like to start with a story... Despite my initial reservations, “Smart

Growth” has proven to be a useful umbrella/ meeting ground for a variety of interests.

Smart growth organizations like Smart Growth BC have proven very effective at building coalitions that are an essential precondition for achieving more sustainable communities.

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Smart Growth – A Worthwhile Cause? SG is premised on the assumption that development will

occur and that our goal should be to ensure that it improves the quality of our communities.

The definition offered by Smart Growth BC is that “Smart growth is a collection of land use and develop-ment principles that aim to enhance our quality of life, preserve the natural environment, and save money over time. Smart growth principles ensure that growth is fiscally, environmentally and socially responsible and recognizes the connections between development and quality of life. Smart growth enhances and completes communities by placing priority on infill, redevelopment, and densification strategies.”

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Smart Growth – A Worthwhile Cause? The flaw in this perspective that population and

economic growth, no matter how responsible, cannot be unlimited. The carrying capacity of the Earth is limited and we have already greatly exceeded it.

I see SG as a step forward – as something we can do “until the revolution comes.”

Ultimately, human population and economic activity have to reach a steady-state.

However, at the present time, we cannot build a wall around our urban regions. People will come, development will happen, but the question is how?

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Smart Growth: the Rhetoric and the Reality

How much progress has been made in integrating SG into the mainstream?

Despite activists' and idealistic planners' efforts, the “growth machine” described long ago by Logan and Molotch – or what I call the real estate-industrial complex – continues to dominate in most jurisdictions.

It consists of a coalition of politicians, developers, real estate agents, and other interests for whom growth of any kind, at any cost, is good. (Nanaimo illustrates this well.)

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Smart Growth: the Rhetoric and the Reality

The resulting land use patterns are ugly, unecolo-gical, injurious to civic culture, and not particularly sensitive to the needs of the young, the old, and people who can't afford cars.

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Smart Growth: the Rhetoric and the Reality

The low-quality development produced by this system does not always take the form of low-density sprawl. It can also take the form of “vertical suburbs” – single-use high rises that are equally segregationist in their effects.

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Smart Growth: the Rhetoric and the Reality

I have been involved in some studies that examine how well we are doing in implementing smart growth and sustainability principles (the BC Sprawl Report 2001 and 2004).

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Smart Growth: the Rhetoric and the Reality

A new report applies a similar methodology to Ontario.

Another project – entitled Smart Growth in Canada: Implementation of a Plan-ning Concept – looked at the implemen-tation of smart growth in six urban regions, which we measured using ten indicators, and the results were not encour-aging. Greater Vancouver fared the best of the six.

Smart Growth Advocacy

I have also been involved for the past several years in helping to establish the Smart Growth Canada Network, which has produced a series of nine free on-line mini-courses on Smart Growth, which can be viewed at www.moodleserv.com/smartgrowthca/. You will also find the long and short versions of the CMHC study at www.smartgrowth.ca under ‘useful research’.

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Smart Growth: the Rhetoric and the Reality

Where densification is occurring, it is partly being driven by market factors. Aging baby boomers are downsizing into condos, and some young professionals are deciding that they want the amenities and the stimulation of an urban environment.

Nonethless, stratospheric housing prices are still driving many family-oriented young couples out in the suburbs where they can get much “more house for the money” than in the city.

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Smart Growth as a Movement

Since the 1990s, the SG movement has enjoyed some success, having become official policy for a time in Maryland and, to some degree, in Oregon. In Canada, Smart Growth BC is very effective.

The key to success seems to be two-fold. First, building coalitions of groups that normally would not have much in common: environmentalists, progressive developers and politicians, affordable housing advocates, health professionals, planners/ architects and urban designers, heritage and agricultural advocates, recreationalists, and transit groups.

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Smart Growth as a Movement

All of these groups have a vested interest in turning around sprawl and promoting urban revitalization.

The second key is adopting a multi-pronged approach: offering consulting services to municipalities, doing community education while providing resources to citizens' groups, organizing charrettes, networking, conducting policy-relevant research, lobbying governments, getting messages into the media, and much more. Smart Growth BC has been effective at all of these things.

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Smart Growth as a Movement

For me, the lynchpin is political leadership. In my experience, planners don't – except with the possible exception of big cities – have a lot of power. They are employees, and at the end of the day they have to follow orders from councils and city managers.

If the people on council and in the top administrative posts are Neanderthals, then planners will be forced to rubber-stamp sprawl and inappropriate development.

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Smart Growth as a Movement

Also: it doesn't help that municipalities are in a reactive and somewhat dependent position vis-a-vis developers, even more so than in the U.S.

Municipalities, especially in an era of fiscal downloading, depend on development for new taxes and jobs.

There are a few politicians with vision and guts, but they are too few in number, and they also need support from their citizens who too often support the sprawl status quo.

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Smart Growth as a Movement

We often forget that some of the best urban development in this country was driven by municipalities and senior levels of government – for instance, South False Creek, St. Lawrence Market in Toronto, Granville Island, and Southeast False Creek before the NPA got a hold of it.

However, since the “neo-con” revolution, public sector-led development has become a dirty word and politicians are afraid to move in this direction.

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Smart Growth as a Movement

As more and more politicians do begin to espouse smart growth and its variants, we have to be aware of “accepting substitutes.” Given Sam Sullivan's track record on most things, “eco-density”TM is highly suspect. It may turn out to be a developer “wolf” in “eco” clothing.

Certainly, the second and third wheels of the eco-density “tricycle” – affordability and livability – are not much in evidence.

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SG and New Urbanism

Finally, what is the difference between SG and New Urbanism? Some architects and planners are active in both movements.

Before we compare the two, we need to note that, while NU got its start designing what are essentially pre-1940s-style suburbs, its practitioners are interested in redeveloping inner-city sites, but have had fewer opportunities of doing so – Kentlands in Maryland and Garrison Woods in Calgary being exceptions.

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Inner-City New Urbanism

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SG and New Urbanism

In its neo-Traditional Neighbourhood Develop-ment (TND) manifestation, NU is somewhat more walkable and mixed use, but still relies on a commute to the big city for employment.

In its Transit-Oriented-Development (TOD) manifestation, it is essentially the same as Smart Growth, but with a perhaps narrower focus.

The differences are largely a matter of emphasis. NU puts more emphasis on aesthetics, while SG has put more emphasis on ecological efficiency.

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SG and New Urbanism

NU has put emphasis on the civic realm, while SG has emphasized affordability and citizen participation.

NU started out with a narrower geographical focus, but has increasingly used the notion of an urban transect to extend its purview to all kinds of environments.

NU focuses on form-based codes to achieve aesthetic coherence while SG relies more on traditional planning tools to achieve its goals.

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SG and New Urbanism

Ultimately, if we are to survive as a species, our population and economic output must stabilize and shrink. Until then, Smart Growth and New Urbanism hold out the prospect of slowing the creeping pace of disaster.

They need to be supplemented by perspectives of adaptive management and decentralized infra-structure so as to make our urban regions more resilient in the face of peak oil and climate change.