Jimmy Carter and Joe Frank Harris: creating growth management planning in Georgia, 1971–1989

Abstract

Planning scholars have cited state growth management programmes as a critical outcome of the ‘quiet revolution’ in the regulation of land use in the United States, a phenomenon that Fred Bosselman and David Callies identified in 1971. Typically referring to a collection of state-level laws that provide support for planning, mandate local land-use plans, require coordination among adjacent jurisdictions, and enhance protections for fragile natural resources, the academic understanding of growth management has tended to be based on the experiences of a few environmentally ‘progressive’ states. The US state of Georgia has rarely been lauded for its efforts to regulate development. Yet in 1989, the state enacted a law that instituted new tools to improve coordination between local governments and the state, but stopped short of mandating local land-use planning. Like policies in other states, Georgia's growth management scheme was designed to strengthen state control over the local planning process. Unlike other states, Georgia's system did little to determine the location of that growth. This paper provides a detailed account of the political process by which an idea for reigning in ‘abusive’ land development hatched by Governor Jimmy Carter in the course of a government reform movement in the early 1970s was repurposed by Governor Joe Frank Harris in the 1980s to support urban sprawl.