Smart Growth (Part 2)

Paradigm shifts—or wholesale changes in the thinking and practice of a profession or discipline—are as rare as they are exciting. Once they occur, they become objects of intense study for both practitioners and historians, for they mark dramatic shifts in way people perceive and react to new circumstances and new understandings. In history, as clearly as in physics, any sudden change in an object's trajectory demands an explanation.

The urban planning field is undergoing such a change. Urban planning is a quintessentially multi-disciplinary profession; its practitioners come from varied academic backgrounds and have been justifiably referred to as "generalists with a specialty." Above all, it is a profession that works in the context of often heated and variable political and populist winds. Be that as it may, I am certainly not alone in my doubt that even the most gifted of the screen writers currently on strike could ever craft an even remotely compelling script about the professional lives of the planning staff in any metropolitan area. Yet the new initiatives coming out of the planning community—and the communities they serve—are intended to produce noticeable and perhaps critical changes in the way American life is lived. Planning today has been overtaken by movements both professional and popular to create alternatives to prevailing automobileoriented sprawl.

That is a tall order. Tall orders come from hungry customers. Reactions against sprawl are as old as the phenomenon itself. Some complaints concerned aesthetics—most humans regard sprawl as simply ugly to look at. Some concerned traffic—though many communities reacted to traffic congestion by simply "paving their way out of it" by widening roads and creating new ones. America's love affair with the car required untold miles of asphalt which, as it turned out, begat yet more asphalt...

It is said that Americans drive so much because we have given ourselves little alternative. Since 1980, the total Vehicular Miles Traveled (VMT) in the United States grew three times as fast as the population itself. More tellingly, VMT grew at twice the rate of vehicle registrations. Over the same time, the urbanized area of the United States grew more than three times faster than its urban population. And today, transportation accounts for about one-third of our nation's carbon dioxide equivalent emissions.

Energy use and greenhouse gas emissions are directly implicated in our settlement patterns. At present rates of growth, the increase in VMT threatens to actually cancel out projected gains from improved fuel efficiency and lower fuel carbon content. The Department of Energy projects a fifty-nine percent increase in VMT over the next twenty-five years against a total population increase of just under thirty percent. Two-thirds of these miles traveled are within urban areas—the miles we drive each day to work, to shop, to eat, to drink and home again to sleep.

As state and federal funding for cities throughout the United States became more stingy, sprawl became less fiscally sustainable. My last article dealt with the causes and consequences of urban sprawl. As the costs associated with unplanned development mounted, various policies and efforts emerged to contain sprawl.

One such technique is called growth phasing. Growth phasing planning is concerned primarily with controlling the timing and rate of development. Conventional zoning had allowed any permitted use to be developed at any rate and at any time so long as it conformed to zoning standards. Growth phasing allows for the planned sequencing of real estate development, typically with the aim of keeping growth in line with a city's capacity to provide public services such as roads and sewers and other utilities. Another related system is called rate of growth planning. Rate of growth systems are imposed to more actively control urban sprawl by imposing quantitative limits or quotas on residential or commercial developments. Some communities have actually imposed growth moratoriums which prohibit any development of specific areas in an effort to arrest haphazard development.

Planners experimented with other techniques and the lexicon of growth management grew. Improved techniques of modeling and simulation, better data quality and the rapid spread of computational power allowed even small town planners to adequately quantify costs and make projections. One currently popular system ties development approvals to the availability of pubic services, allowing cities to have clear policies regarding what public services must be in place relative to the impacts estimated for any development.

Communities have also charged developers "impact fees" to offset the public costs of private development. Smart growth means more than sprawl containment. In the present context of our dangerous oil dependence and global climate threats, the smart growth movement is visualizing a process of actual sprawl reversal. At stake is nothing less than a rewriting of the typical American urban landscape. Proposals for reversing sprawl entail creating more compact developments which provide viable communities which are less dependent upon private automobile travel. One important thing to note is that "compact" development does not necessarily imply high-rise or uniformly high residential density, but rather, higher average "blended" densities between residences, workplaces, and shopping areas. Land use "mixing"—the interblending of our now largely separate geographies of work and residence is vital to the movement. Smart growth, briefly put, wants to replace sprawl development with more "centered" developments where people have a chance to live closer to their jobs and the amenities they want. These communities would be more human scale, walkable and easily serviced by public transportation.

This vision requires zoning and planning techniques that allow for mixed land uses and thus encourage the collocation of homes, shops, offices and other places of work. This type of cluster zoning is a hallmark of the smart growth movement. Cluster zoning is designed to concentrate development onto smaller lots to both preserve open space and limit overall vehicle dependency. Mixed land uses would allow for the flexible development or redevelopment of urban land parcels as single units with mixtures of different buildings and land uses which traditional exclusionary zoning forbade. Planners and developers are now looking at ways of arranging a variety of buildings of different functions, styles and sizes on the basis of aesthetics, functionality and actual ground site conditions. Cluster zoning, in a very important sense, represents a fundamental deregulation of urban land use compared to single-use zoning systems. It treats tracts of land as integral units of living and working which should be planned at the neighborhood level. As such, the site plan review process inherent in cluster zoning typically strengthens the control local governments and citizens groups have over the pace and sequencing of development.

The effort is unprecedented. The types of communities which are typical of smart growth visions are decidedly not. We must remember that it has taken some 60 years of automobile-centered development to make Main Streets, front porches and walkable neighborhoods a thing of the past while the suburban homes, multi-car garages and colossal freeway shopping centers with acres of parking expanded. Smart growth is to no uncertain extent about remembering. Smart growth takes it cues from the past, from an American urban era which existed before the automobile took over. Urbanists are studying America's pre-sprawl urban patterns, delving into the way people lived and worked before the suburban commute took up so much time and space. Recently, the Institute of Transportation Engineers and the Congress for the New Urbanism (a smart growth planning group) developed context-sensitive design standards for such walkable communities. More such efforts will surely follow.

One immediate question follows: the land we call "sprawled" is already developed. Can't we expect it will remain that way for decades to come? Even if we are to reverse sprawl, what will happen to the "sprawl remnants" lining the motorways? This is a serious issue, but it is not as critical an impediment as one may think. Buildings are only relatively permanent. In the case of non-residential buildings, turnover rates of around twenty percent per decade are normal and they are higher for low-rise buildings typical of strip development. At present rates of building turnover, more than one-half of the built environment in the US present twenty years from now will have been built since the year 2000 and two-thirds of development on the ground will be developed or redeveloped between now and 2050. In this context, planners have what could well be an unprecedented opportunity to reshape the urban landscape.

America's demographics are also changing. The baby-boomers represent America's largest generational cohort. They are retiring and becoming empty-nesters in droves, far less interested in commuting for groceries and mowing their own yards. Younger Americans are delaying or often forgoing marriage and having fewer children. The children who grew up in America's suburbs (I among them) have grown up with a certain disillusionment with suburban life. There is a significant portion of the population which desires alternatives. Developers, real-estate professionals and planners alike are aware of this.

But what is at root is more than catering to lifestyle preferences. The imperative is simple sustainability. America's carbon foot print is enormous—particularly in per-capita terms. Our transition to a more energy efficient and renewable future hinges on re-creating the very geography of our lives, in essence imaginatively recreating in the twenty first century the types of communities which existed prior to the hegemony of the automobile. Never before has a vision of an urban past—the America before sprawl—been so relevant for our urban future.