What smart growth is and how it should direct us in future planning and development remain cryptic and unclear concerns to many observers, including decision makers in the public arena who must learn a new vocabulary and offer more than rhetoric to citizens hungry for strong policy, planning and design solutions. Whether one sees smart growth as a slogan, a catch phrase, a call to the barricades or perhaps even the battle flag waved by the enemy, it raises questions that we need to answer:

·Have the most important lessons from past development practices been fully absorbed and learned?

·In striving to advance alternatives to low-density, haphazard forms of development, are there viable models?

·Have practical, ethical and distribution considerations been appropriately brought to bear on proposed smart growth interventions?

·Are the components of what we call smart growth constitutionally permissible?

·What consequences may unfold to affect various stakeholders and constituencies?

Editors Terry S. Szold of MIT and Armando Carbonell of the Lincoln Institute organized a symposium to bring together academics, planning and design practitioners, citizen planners and others to address these and related questions. The symposium “Smart Growth: Form and Consequences” was cosponsored by the Lincoln Institute and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and was held on March 10, 2000, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The chapters in this book, adapted from the presentations at the symposium, offer eclectic and wide-ranging essays that take the reader through the history of suburban growth to the spatial and temporal consequences of the current state and stages of growth and technological change, and across the normative assumptions about design, urban and suburban neglect and revival, private versus public property rights, and environmental ethics.

Related Link: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy

For more information contact:

Coretta Corbin Rival
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
113 Brattle Street
Cambridge
MA 02138
USA

Phone: 800-526-3873 or 617-661-3016,
Email: [email protected]
Web: http://www.lincolninst.edu