New Urbanism and Smart Growth: A Few Words from the Academy

Concerns about urban sprawl are not new. In a 1958 essay titled Urban Sprawl that appeared in Fortune, William Whyte warned Americans that their penchant for using five acres to do the work of one was not only bad aesthetics but bad eco- nomics. In the ensuing years, the movement to contain or mitigate sprawl has grown in fits and starts following cycles loosely correlated with the economy and government administrations. Often, as momentum renews, the battle cries change. Those who once advocated growth control later called for growth management, smart growth, new urbanism, and sustainable development. This issue of the Review contains articles that address two interrelated perspectives on mitigating sprawl: smart growth and new urbanism. While smart growth and new urbanism share much with similar movements of the past and perhaps the future, both have attained a level of legitimacy and currency that warrant new serious scholarly examination of their premises and implications. SMART GROWTH According to the Environmental Protection Agency (2004), smart growth is that serves the economy, the community, and the environment .I t changes the terms of the development debate away from the traditional growth/no growth question to how and where should new development be accommodated. Toward this end, the U.S. EPA established in 1996, and continues to fund, a net- work of advocacy organizations dedicated to smart growth principles. Thanks in large to this network, smart growth is now part of the lexicon of planners, policy makers, and almost everyone with interest in urban and regional development. Though the origins of the term are unclear, the rapid ascendance of smart growth can be traced to three key projects (Burchell, Listokin, and Galley 2000). In the