Smart Growth and The Compact City
The term 'smart growth' has been particularly used in North America. The terms 'compact city' or 'urban intensification' are often used to describe similar concepts, in Europe and particularly the UK where it has influenced Government policy and planning practice in recent years.
The first urban growth boundary in the U.S. was in Fayette County, Kentucky in 1958. Fifteen years later, the state of Oregon enacted a law in 1973 limiting the area urban areas could occupy, through urban growth boundaries. As a result, Portland, the state's largest urban area, has become a leader in smart growth policies that seek to make urban areas more compact (they are called urban consolidation policies). After the creation of this boundary, the population density of the urbanized area increased somewhat (from 1,135 in 1970 to 1,290 per km² in 2000). While the growth boundary has not been tight enough to vastly increase density, the consensus is that the growth boundaries have protected great amounts of wild areas and farmland around the metro area.
Many parts of the San Francisco Bay Area have also adopted urban growth boundaries; 25 of its cities and 5 of its counties have urban growth boundaries. Many of these were adopted with the support and advocacy of Greenbelt Alliance, a non-profit land conservation and urban planning organization.
In other areas, the design principles of District Regionalism and New Urbanism have been employed to combat urban sprawl. The concept of Circular flow land use management has been developed in Europe to reduce land take by urban sprawl through promoting inner-city and brownfield development.
Read more about this topic: Urban Sprawl
Famous quotes containing the words smart, growth, compact and/or city:
“For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it chance.”
—Christopher Smart (1722–1771)
“Here commences what was called, twenty years ago, the best timber land in the State. This very spot was described as “covered with the greatest abundance of pine,” but now this appeared to me, comparatively, an uncommon tree there,—and yet you did not see where any more could have stood, amid the dense growth of cedar, fir, etc.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority.”
—Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906)
“The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears—as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk- happy.”
—Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959)