Smart growth
It also advocates compact, transit-oriented, walkable, bicycle-friendly land use, including neighborhood schools, complete streets, and mixed-use development with a range of housing choices.
Some of the fundamental aims for the benefits of residents and the communities are increasing family income and wealth, providing safe walking routes to schools, fostering livable, safe and healthy places, stimulating economic activity (both locally and regionally), and developing, preserving and investing in built and natural resources.
One of the earliest efforts to establish smart growth forward as an explicit regulatory framework were put forth by the American Planning Association (APA).
"[3] Smart growth agenda is comprehensive and ambitious, however, its implementation is problematic as control of outward movement means limiting availability of single-family homes and reliance on the automobile, the mainstay of the traditional American lifestyle.
For example, in the state of Massachusetts smart growth is enacted by a combination of techniques including increasing housing density along transit nodes, conserving farm land, and mixing residential and commercial use areas.
These include supporting existing communities, redeveloping underutilized sites, enhancing economic competitiveness, providing more transportation choices, developing livability measures and tools, promoting equitable and affordable housing, providing a vision for sustainable growth, enhancing integrated planning and investment, aligning, coordinating, and leveraging government policies, redefining housing affordability and making the development process transparent.
[6] Related, but somewhat different, are the overarching goals of smart growth, and they include: making the community more competitive for new businesses, providing alternative places to shop, work, and play, creating a better "Sense of Place," providing jobs for residents, increasing property values, improving quality of life, expanding the tax base, preserving open space, controlling growth, and improving safety.
The cost and difficulty of acquiring land (particularly in historic and/or areas designated as conservancies) to build and widen highways caused some politicians to reconsider basing transportation planning on motor vehicles.
The Local Government Commission which presents the annual New Partners for Smart Growth conference adopted the original Ahwahnee Principles in 1991[8] which articulates many of the major principles now generally accepted as part of the smart growth movement such as transit oriented development, a focus on walking distance, greenbelts and wildlife corridors, and infill and redevelopment.
With electricity, there is a cost associated with extending and maintaining the service delivery system, as with water and sewage, but there also is a loss in the commodity being delivered.
Such a tactic includes adopting redevelopment strategies and zoning policies that channel housing and job growth into urban centers and neighborhood business districts, to create compact, walkable, and bike- and transit-friendly hubs.
Transit-oriented development (TOD) is a residential or commercial area designed to maximize access to public transport, and mixed-use/compact neighborhoods tend to use transit at all times of the day.
[19] Many cities striving to implement better TOD strategies seek to secure funding to create new public transportation infrastructure and improve existing services.
Other measures might include regional cooperation to increase efficiency and expand services, and moving buses and trains more frequently through high-use areas.
Other topics fall under this concept: Biking and walking instead of driving can reduce emissions, save money on fuel and maintenance, and foster a healthier population.
Additional density incentives can be offered for development of brownfield and greyfield land or for providing amenities such as parks and open space.
Related to zoning ordinances, an urban growth boundary (UGB) is a tool used in some U.S. cities to contain high density development to certain areas.
Conservationists, neighborhood advocacy groups and NIMBYs are often skeptical about such impact reports, even when they are prepared by independent agencies and subsequently approved by the decision makers rather than the promoters.
[26] In Savannah, Georgia (US) the historic Oglethorpe Plan has been shown to contain most of the elements of smart growth in its network of wards, each of which has a central civic square.
[28] Whether smart growth (or the "compact City") does or can reduce problems of automobile dependency associated with urban sprawl have been fiercely contested issues over several decades.
[29] An influential study in 1989 by Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy compared 32 cities across North America, Australia, Europe and Asia.
One confounding factor, which has been the subject of many studies, is residential self-selection:[33] people who prefer to drive tend to move towards low density suburbs, whereas people who prefer to walk, cycle or use transit tend to move towards higher density urban areas, better served by public transport.
At the level of the neighbourhood or individual development positive measures (e.g. improvements to public transport) will usually be insufficient to counteract the traffic effect of increasing population density.
In contrast, the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts reported that its Kendall Square neighborhood saw a 40% increase in commercial space attended by a traffic decrease of 14%.
He argued before the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works that, "smart growth strategies tend to intensify the very problems they are purported to solve.
"[43] Cox and Joshua Utt analyzed smart growth and sprawl, and argued that:[44] Our analysis indicates that the Current Urban Planning Assumptions are of virtually no value in predicting local government expenditures per capita.
[47] Some libertarian groups, such as the Cato Institute, criticize smart growth on the grounds that it leads to greatly increased land values, and people with average incomes can no longer afford to buy detached houses.
[48] A number of ecological economists claim that industrial civilization has already "overshot" the carrying capacity of the Earth, and "smart growth" is mostly an illusion.
"[50][51] Factors include a lack of incentives for builders to redevelop older neighborhoods and limits on the ability of state planners to force local jurisdictions to approve high-density developments in "smart-growth" areas.
