Smart Growth and the Limits to Growth: An Irreconcilable Contradiction

1
Smart Growth and the Limits to Growth An
Irreconcilable Contradiction?
2
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.

3
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.

4
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?

5
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.)

6
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.

7
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.

8
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).

9
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.

10
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/smartgro
  wthca/. You will also find the long and short
  versions of the CMHC study at www.smartgrowth.ca
  under useful research.

11
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.

12
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.

13
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.

14
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.

15
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.

16
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.

17
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-densityTM 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.

18
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.

19
Inner-City New Urbanism
20
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.

21
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.

22
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.