Theory: A City-Regional Geography of Multiple Orders

Abstract

The pursuit of urban sustainability through smart growth programs, policies, and projects—the subject of this book—raises wider theoretical questions about how we should map the highly variegated ways in which regional planning strategies ultimately (re)shape urban form, in Greater Seattle or indeed any other city-regional environment. In particular, are the spaces that smart growth (helps to) make sustainable or unsustainable or in fact both at the same time, albeit unevenly across metropolitan space? This chapter discusses smart growth as a syncretic normative planning theory for regional (re)development, covering literatures that seek to define its key aspirational traits as well as its major territorial impacts in applied practice at various scales of governance. The chapter then turns to the concept of “intercurrence,” deployed from the field of American Political Development (APD), for theoretical inspiration. Intercurrence, it is argued, highlights the inevitable “abrading” of multiple orders at any given site, allowing us to reconsider the uneven geopolitical-economies of smart growth as a contested form of American territorial governance. Rather than wholly dismiss or uncritically celebrate smart growth through radical, liberal, or progressive ontologies, respectively, intercurrence foregrounds the multiplicities of consciously organized space.