Home: Residential Geographies of Contained (Re)ordering

Abstract

Smart growth is about attacking sprawl, particularly as this involves the (re)ordering of residential development. Yet countering sprawl takes on complex institutional, strategic, and policy forms. While many Federal policies continue to promote low-density forms of development, state-progressives support smart growth policies because they believe that enhanced compactness will improve environmental performance. Whether it does or not, how so, in what ways, and for whom, are nonetheless unresolved, contested questions. This chapter focuses empirically on policy efforts since the early 1990s to counter sprawl using regionally coordinated urban growth boundaries. In order to make the themes more cosmopolitan and comparative, the discussion refers to this overall strategy, institutionalized legally by the Growth Management Act of 1990/1991, as “smart containment.” Particular attention is paid to tensions between the recent, inter-scalar policy pursuit of sustainability through smart containment and older, obdurate problems of segregation, picking up synoptic themes touched upon and developed in earlier chapters.