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People who live in compact, traditional towns have far smaller environmental footprints than those who live in sprawling suburbs. So why are we in thrall to urban sprawl? Are there better ways of getting about than by car? And how can 60 million people crammed into a small island find ways of treating it with respect? Urban sprawl is unsustainable in an age of climate change and peak oil. But for 100 years the UK’s planning policies have been based on ideals of low-density living and attitudes that favour the individual over community, creating car-dependent lifestyles and destroying the countryside we love. This book explains what we must do to improve the quality of life in our overcrowded land. Smart Growth argues that we should look to America – a country that embraced urban sprawl and car dependency on a far grander scale than we ever did, and is now finding answers to the problem. Its ‘Smart Growth’ movement is steering a course towards better-designed, compact cities and rail-based transit systems, thereby restoring communities ruined by decades of suburban insularity.
Solving Sprawl shines a spotlight on American communities that are applying smart growth principles in successfully addressing the problem of sprawl. It offers examples that illustrate key concepts and tells the story of how this new approach to development has caught hold across America. It reports the good news that successful smart-growth developments can now be found throughout the country, with communities large and small implementing a wide array of innovative solutions. The book details 35 diverse smart-growth stories from around the United States and celebrates those who are leading the way in solving sprawl –state and local officials who have embraced new forms of development, corporations who are choosing to redevelop abandoned city properties rather than build new corporate campuses on undeveloped land, faith-based organizations that have been instrumental in redeveloping inner-city neighborhoods, visionary architects and planners who are showing how to design communities and regions that solve sprawl. Each chapter showcases a wide variety of solutions with projects of all sizes in urban, suburban, and exurban settings including Adidas Village in Portland, Oregon; the MCI Center in Washington, D.C.; Quality Hill in Kansas City, Kansas; Suisun City redevelopment in Suisun City, California; growth control initiatives in Boulder, Colorado; Pearl Lake in Almira Township, Michigan; and more. Interspersed throughout are sidebars that offer additional examples and reminders of the sprawl-related environmental and social problems that smart growth helps overcome. The book also includes a glossary of planning terms and land-use concepts. Instead of obliterating our countryside while jeopardizing our financial reserves and weakening our social bonds, we are learning how to develop and grow in ways that better reflect our values. Solving Sprawl brings a renewed sense of hope and inspiration about smart growth and its potential for creating a more livable country.
Rev. ed. of: From sprawl to smart growth.
Across the nation, the debate over metropolitan sprawl and its impact has become pivotal to urban planning. A decade and a half ago, Smart Growth America and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sought to raise the level of the debate by sponsoring groundbreaking research to quantitatively measure sprawl and its quality-of-life impacts. The resulting measures are widely used in urban research and public health. Costs of Sprawl provides a panoramic guide to urban form in America, measures sprawl for metropolitan areas, urbanized areas, and counties, and studies the relationship between sprawl and quality-of-life outcomes. From this preliminary investigation, it looks like the costs of sprawl are varied and substantial, and the alternative of compact development is far superior. An essential read for researchers, planners, urban designers, policy makers, and smart growth advocates in the U.S. and abroad, this book provides a comprehensive and detailed analysis of one of the most critical issues in planning today.
This book investigates the new urban geographies of “smart” metropolitan regionalism across the Greater Seattle area and examines the relationship between smart growth planning strategies and spaces of work, home, and mobility. The book specifically explores Seattle within the wider space-economy and multi-scaled policy regime of the Puget Sound region as a whole, ‘jumping up’ from questions of city politics to concerns with what the book interprets as the “intercurrence” of city-regional “ordering." These theoretical terms capture the state-progressive effort to promote smarter forms of regional development but also the societal/institutional tensions and outright contradictions that such urban development invariably entails, particularly around problems of social equity. Key organizing themes in the text include: the historical path-dependencies of uneven economic and social development, particularly between Tacoma-Pierce County and Seattle-King County; current patterns of high-wage, medium-wage, and low-wage jobs; the emerging spatial and social structure of recent residential changes, especially with respect to class and race composition; and, finally, transit trends and new urban spaces associated with policy efforts to mitigate highway congestion and car-dependency. Greater Seattle, then, is mapped as a key US urban region inscribed spatially by the uneven search for a more sustainable order. Historically-sensitive, theoretically-informed and empirically topical, this book is of interest to scholars and students at all levels in regional planning, urban geography, political science, sustainability studies, urban sociology and public policy.
Smart growth and its role in future planning and development remain confusing to many, including decision makers in the public arena who represent citizens hungry for strong policy, planning, and design solutions. The essays in this book cover the history of suburban growth, consequences of current growth and technological change, assumptions about design, urban and suburban neglect and revival, property rights, and environmental ethics.
An examination of the history and consequences of the search for space, air, views, schools, and safety that has resulted in suburbanization. It explodes some myths as it examines the effects of suburban growth on wildlife and nature. It contrasts the results of big government-imposed "solutions" with those of local initiatives and private-sector creativity. It explores the failures and successes of efforts to restore core values and quality to inner-city life.
'Urban Sprawl and Public Health' offers a survey of the impact that the built environment can have on the health of the people who inhabit our cities. The authors go on to suggest ways in which the design of cities could be improved & have a positive impact on the well-being of their citizens.
The smart growth movement aims to combat urban and suburban sprawl by promoting livable communities based on pedestrian scale, diverse populations, and mixed land use. But, as this book documents, smart growth has largely failed to address issues of social equity and environmental justice. Smart growth sometimes results in gentrification and displacement of low- and moderate-income families in existing neighborhoods, or transportation policies that isolate low-income populations. Growing Smarter is one of the few books to view smart growth from an environmental justice perspective, examining the effect of the built environment on access to economic opportunity and quality of life in American cities and metropolitan regions. The contributors to Growing Smarter—urban planners, sociologists, economists, educators, lawyers, health professionals, and environmentalists—all place equity at the center of their analyses of "place, space, and race." They consider such topics as the social and environmental effects of sprawl, the relationship between sprawl and concentrated poverty, and community-based regionalism that can link cities and suburbs. They examine specific cases that illustrate opportunities for integrating environmental justice concerns into smart growth efforts, including the dynamics of sprawl in a South Carolina county, the debate over the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and transportation-related pollution in Northern Manhattan. Growing Smarter illuminates the growing racial and class divisions in metropolitan areas today—and suggests workable strategies to address them.