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The Charlotte Observer
newspaper
in March 2003 extolled the efforts of many volun-
teers to promote a more sustainable agenda for man-
aging growth in the surrounding region. But in
reality there is little to show for these efforts as none
of the volunteer and non-profit organizations have
executive authority or large funds to support their
activities. Their main achievement has been to get
officials, citizens and business leaders talking about
the issues. However, the progressive ideas of these
pressure groups are often politely accepted and then
sidelined by a power structure based largely on main-
taining the status quo. Indeed, even at the grassroots
level, many such growth management efforts are
reactive, aimed more at stopping growth in specific
local circumstances with no comprehension of any
larger picture. At a larger scale, few, if any, American
politicians are pushing for regional government as
they know full well that voters have no liking for it. A
poll in the Charlotte newspaper indicated that a large
majority, nearly half of all those questioned (47
percent) believed that regional growth should be
handled by citizens themselves, not government. The
kind of government agency needed to enact compre-
hensive and enforceable regional planning received a
measly 12 percent of the votes.
This general distrust of government and the
hijacking of Smart Growth terminology by local
organizations who want to stop growth altogether
feeds opponents of Smart Growth as they gear up to
roll back the few gains made in America, emboldened
by the weakening of environmental laws by the
Washington DC government. A March 2003 editor-
ial in 
Smart Growth Online
quoted Joel Hirschhorn,
the Director of Natural Resources Policy Studies
for the National Governors Association Center for
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CHAPTER SIX
●
URBAN DESIGN IN THE REAL WORLD
123
Best Practices, writing in an op-ed piece in www.
planetizen.com that: ‘The hatred of government
and regulations by conservatives and libertarians
from all over the nation is more focused. Everything
they see as wrong with (America) is labeled smart
growth.’ Hirschhorn went on to report that Smart
Growth adversaries are ‘sharpening their rhetoric,
reshaping their statistics, learning fast, getting more
cohesive and painting smart growth as “snob
growth,” which reduces home and transportation
choices, increases housing and transportation costs,
limits affordable housing, harms minorities, stems
economic growth and prosperity, and threatens “the
American dream” .’ (Hirschhorn, 2003).
In effect, opponents are creating an Alice-in-
Wonderland world where everything is the opposite
of what it seems, and forging a coordinated campaign
of disinformation to sway public opinion. Despite
the appearance of scholarly researchers, Hirschhorn
notes that conservative think tanks such as the
Thoreau Institute operate as the public relations arm
of the ‘national sprawl industry’ (ibid.). Hirschhorn
warns Smart Growth organizations that they must be
unequivocally pro-growth. They should absolutely
disavow groups that profess Smart Growth but in
reality try to stop development, and true Smart
Growth advocates must stress the market advantages
of this type of development.
A hostile political environment such as this raises the
obvious question: why bother? The answer is simple.
We must try. It’s our duty. The professions of architec-
ture and planning have a responsibility to envision a
better future for our society and to assist governments,
the public, and the private sector to achieve these
higher goals, however Sisyphean the task may appear.
Indeed, there are several small causes for optimism in
the swirling debate about the future of American cities.
They are scattered across the nation, and individually
modest in their scope and achievements, but taken
together they comprise an agenda of hope and progress.
The most progressive examples of regional plan-
ning with an eye to Smart Growth are those previ-
ously mentioned in Portland, Oregon, and the twin
cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul in Minesota. Salt Lake
City in Utah has also initiated a progressive regional
planning process for the Salt Lake-Wasatch area
which led to the passage of the Quality Growth Act
by the State legislature in 1999 (Calthorpe and
Fulton: p. 138). Portland is perhaps the most
‘European’ of all American cities in its planning
strategies, which feature a regional urban growth
boundary, local comprehensive plans with minimum
housing densities, urban villages around rail transit
stops, significant investment in the downtown core,
and a regional open space plan – all with a strong
regional government to back it up (Beatley: p. 67).
For Smart Growth planners and urban designers
this situation represents as close to utopia as it’s possi-
ble to get in contemporary America, but to many in
the development and real estate industries, the com-
prehensiveness and regional scope of this planning
system is ideologically repugnant. It’s almost routine
at homebuilders’ or Realtors’ conferences to hear
speakers lampoon Portland’s regional cooperation as
‘The People’s Republic of Portland,’ and in the minds
of many passive observers, this title tars the progres-
sive model with the dreaded brush of socialism and
anti-Americanism. However loopy this may seem to
British readers (and it’s pretty daft to lots of
Americans, too) it’s a political reality that has a lot of
impact on development decisions in many cities all
across the country. In our work in the American
South, we’ve learned to use very few examples from
Portland as it can be counterproductive, and gener-
ates as much negative reaction as positive support.
There must be something special about the
American northwest, for the neighboring west coast
city of Seattle in Washington State also demonstrates
progressive planning around the concepts of urban
mixed-use village centers served by public transit
within an urban area growth boundary. The founda-
tion for these initiatives was laid by Seattle’s 2002
Vision Plan dating from 1987, which stimulated the
passage of a statewide growth management law,
the 1991 Washington Growth Management Act. The
concept of transit supported mixed-use urban centers
as a growth management tool is gathering momen-
tum in many other American cities. Other North
American cities currently operating or planning new
light rail or commuter rail systems include Dallas,
Texas; Sacramento, San Diego, San Jose and Los
Angeles, all in California; Charlotte and Raleigh,
North Carolina; St. Louis, Missouri; Baltimore,
Maryland; Washington, DC; Denver, Colorado;
and Toronto, in Canada. Even Phoenix, Arizona, by
many measures the most sprawling city in the USA is
building its first light rail line. However, few are con-
sidering the more difficult, but equally necessary
growth boundary legislation.
Our home city of Charlotte is a classic case. It is
spending a lot of money and effort in planning and
constructing a good transit system with a necklace of
urban villages along the lines. At the same time it’s
constructing a massive outerbelt freeway that is
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spreading growth into surrounding counties at a
faster rate than planning can manage. In Charlotte,
and many other American cities using the same rail-
based planning concepts, there is a vocal debate
about the relevance of rail transit as the catalyst for
reshaping the city. Critics describe it as a ‘nineteenth
century technology’ unsuited to the car-dominated
American landscape. The fact that passenger trains
are almost extinct in America has consigned rail tech-
nology to the museum in the minds of many citizens
and policy makers alike, and blinded them to the fact
that modern rail transit is a very effective and
advanced technology. This is a strikingly different
attitude to Europe’s, where train service has remained
an integral part of life.
The companion piece to public transit in these
first efforts at creating a sustainable urban strategy
is the much-touted mixed-use urban village. At its
root, this development type represents our best
chance at meeting what is perhaps the most crucial
challenge in American urbanism at the start of the
new century: how can we re-embed real and mean-
ingful public space into the sprawling new develop-
ments of the urban periphery?
However, the urban village has many detractors
from the conservative end of the political spectrum,
and opposition also arises from residents of existing
neighborhoods. American conservative opinion
decries the concept as social engineering, by which
they suggest that elitist planners and architects are
‘forcing Americans to live like Europeans’ – a step
backward to people of this jingoistic mindset. The
opposition from residents of existing neighborhoods
is less ideological. It’s generally the classic Not In My
Backyard (NIMBY) variety, where residents erro-
neously equate density with crime, traffic and lower
property values. While these NIMBYs drive us mad
in practice, we have to sympathize with them to some
(small) degree. Examples of this kind of urban village
development have been so sparse in American sub-
urbs for the last 50 years that public opinion has few
positive models to relate to. Only in the past five
years have decent developments of this type begun to
appear in American cities (see Plate 9).
Despite this combined opposition, urban villages
have one very powerful ally – national demographics.
The number of American households that conform to
the conventional profile of a married couple with chil-
dren, typical consumers of single-family housing in
suburbia, fell to less than one quarter (24.3 percent)
of the total number of households as recorded in the
2000 census, and is expected to keep falling for the
next several decades. By contrast, the numbers of
aging ‘baby boomers’ who are ‘downsizing’ to urban
dwellings in more compact, walkable urban areas is
increasing, as is the number of ‘echo boomers,’ the
generation that comprises the children of baby-
boomers. Both generations are seeking an urban set-
ting that supports their changing lifestyle expectations
as an alternative to conventional suburbia.
The urban village typology meets the needs of the
younger group of residents, workers and consumers,
who desire a vibrant urban environment replete with
street life, bars, restaurants, an art and music scene,
and social diversity – the sort of places discussed by
Richard Florida in