By Ron Tarter, Russell Springs, Kentucky
From Foresight, Vol. 8, No.4
published 2002
Your Volume 8, No. 2, of Foresight includes some interesting views in relation to “smart growth.” As a career, certified planner with 27 years’ experience, I have seen each of the four basic “pro-smart growth” groups in action, and know that Mr. Downs is on target with his assessment. However, I also find his assessment disturbing because it intimately reveals how the competing interests in our society routinely twist the meaning of planning (and other) concepts to suit their own fancy. The basic concepts of smart growth have been around for ages, and are embraced in the positions of each of the four groups that Mr. Downs has described. But, in devoting his analysis to the “group dynamics” that are so prevalent in the American political system of today, he has missed a key component of the smart growth idea, i.e. the notion that the best and the smartest growth is that which best fits the needs of a particular area. “True” smart growth therefore requires that each individual policy be gauged in terms of its “before” and “after” growth impacts and fiscal consequences by a computer-driven, land-use model.
The basic idea is that the least costly of those alternatives that best achieves the needs (i.e. the goals and objectives) of a particular area is, in truth, the smartest growth policy. True smart growth also has another vitally important facet. It suggests that the patience of the American public is limited, that taxpayers are being taxed crazy to support rampant urban sprawl; and that this sprawl eternally necessitates vast new commitments in roads, services, and infrastructure and requires a taxation commitment from the general public that is both exorbitant and unsustainable. It suggests that the only way to get a grip on this situation, and thereby preclude a series of very destructive tax revolts, is through improved planning and land-use modeling, and that all policies of government from federal to state to local, must ultimately be altered in support of what is finally determined to be smart growth.
Unfortunately, the planning discipline has become overly concerned with the political process and group dynamics over the past two decades, and many planners are devoid of the analytical and modeling capabilities to construct the “befores” and “afters” that are so essential to smart growth. This isn’t simply my observation; it is a common observation among planning professionals today. It is a notion often found in journals and books. The mere fact that smart growth must be defined via the definitions of at least four differing interest groups attests to the validity of that statement.
The fact of the matter is that many of the best conceptual planners have never made it above mid-grade in the planning professions because they typically refuse to compromise on analytical principles. So who is going to manage this process? Well, the likely managers are those planners with the highest profile and most credible résumés, namely, those who are on the eternal political float, because that is what society demands of its planners. Those managers can be expected to allow the political process to set the objectives which will guide the smart growth process. The effect is that, in the end, we will find ourselves precisely where we are today. If smart growth is to be meaningful and achieve its purposes, the analysis of alternatives that is truly smart growth must be taken, in large part, out of the subjective realm by whatever set of laws are enacted to set it in place. This means that the American subjective political process must ultimately define the meaning and method of objectivity in terms of urban and regional growth. Pardon me for wondering if this is possible. Don’t get me wrong—I favor smart growth, but to get what really needs to be passed through any state legislature is truly going to be a tall order, and it is certainly going to take a recognition of the great societal stakes that we will ultimately find ourselves playing with.