General Conclusions: Contributions, Limitations, Agenda

Abstract

This book explores the broader pursuit of urban sustainability through the specific institutional and policy lens of multi-scalar planning for smart growth across Greater Seattle. The overall narrative attempts to offer a novel critical-geographical interpretation of the variegated, uneven spatialities of key regional planning policies focused collectively on sustainability by arguing mainly through the central theoretical concept of “intercurrence,” imported from the neo-Weberian field of American Political Development (APD). No one has attempted to theorize smart growth in this way. Nor have many scholars analyzed urban sustainability as the abutting and grading of the hypothesized “orders” that intercurrence invariably produces through time and across space. The book thus supports extant work on the emerging geographies of US planning regimes and territorial experiences. But the critical spatialization of APD in urban affairs and planning studies has just begun.