Introduction to the Special Issue on Smart Growth

Abstract

The phrase “smart growth” has clearly captured the imagination of organizations and individuals whose work is focused on protecting the environment and promoting increased standards of living and quality of life. In Table 1, we can see that smart growth, the newest of the phrases included, is actually in greater use in the popular media (as depicted by the search engine, Google) than other phrases that have been in use much longer. As I write this, a search on the phrase “smart growth” produced nearly a 100,000 more results than “growth management,” a phrase that is closely related and is such a fundamental part of the planning lexicon that it is formally incorporated into the curriculum and specializations of its degree-granting programs. It also produced nearly 200,000 more results than the phrase “urban and regional planning,” even though many planners would argue that our field has been engaged in efforts to promote smart growth since its inception. While the raison d’etre for smart growth is to influence the direction of urban and regional development, the search on this phrase yielded less than 21,000 results in the popular media. The Library of Congress Online Catalog was searched to assess how smart growth, and the other four phrases in Table 1 that historically characterize much of the planning discipline’s focus are present in the formal literature. Here, it can be seen that smart growth has only a small presence. Reassuring to planners, the phrase “urban and regional planning” has the largest presence. Two thoughts emerge from this simple exercise of comparison. First, it is disappointing to observe how underrecognized urban (city) and regional planning is in the popular media. Would the wildfire spread of the smart growth concept have occurred if the public had a greater understanding of what urban and regional planning is about? Clearly, our discipline has not done an adequate job of communicating to the larger world what we are about and what we have to contribute. Second, now that the smart growth concept has taken off, it is essential that the planning discipline be engaged in the dialogue that will increasingly appear in the literature on what its goals are and how it is implemented. The three articles included in this special issue on smart growth increase planning’s contribution to the dialogue and highlight some of the areas where more scholarship is needed. These articles focus on relatively neglected issues in the smart growth dialogue that reflect planning’s particular concerns for process and implementation, land preservation and green space, and neglected areas of decline within metropolitan regions. In the first article, “What Is ‘Smart Growth’— Really?” Ye, Mandpe, and Meyer ask whether the smart growth label has failed to develop any clear-cut meaning in the time it has been adopted by many different