Characteristics of smart growth

Its sustainable development goals are to achieve a unique sense of community and place; expand the range of transportation, employment, and housing choices; equitably distribute the costs and benefits of development; preserve and enhance natural and cultural resources; and promote public health.

Preserve open space

Land conservation preserves wildlife habitats, protects endangered species, and improves biodiversity. Access to greenspace in both urban and rural settings improves physical and mental health. Undeveloped land near waterways protects water quality and reduces the risk of flooding.

Development guided by smart growth principles can minimize air and water pollution, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, encourage cleanup and reuse of contaminated properties, and preserve natural lands.

General Smart Growth Tools

Smart Growth Self-Assessment for Rural Communities – Tool that lets communities evaluate their existing policies to create healthy, environmentally resilient, and economically robust places.

Smart growth cities and towns have well-defined boundaries, a range of housing options, a mix of residential and commercial buildings, and accessible sidewalks, bike lanes and public transportation. They focus on vibrant, competitive, and livable urban cores.

Whereas New Urbanism emphasizes more on the function and ethics of the construction environment, Smart Growth focuses more on planning. Smart Growth is an urban planning and transportation approach that concentrates growth in compact walkable urban centers to avoid sprawl.

Sustainable development and smart growth are often used interchangeably. It involves policies that integrate transportation and land use decisions by encouraging more compact, mixed-use development (infill) within existing urban areas and discouraging dispersed, automobile-dependent development at the urban fringe.

Compact land use patterns with high-quality pedestrian environments and a mix of land uses can improve public health by promoting active forms of transportation, reducing per capita air pollution and associated respiratory ailments, and lowering the risk of car related accidents.

Open space also provides significant environmental quality and health benefits. Open space protects animal and plant habitat, places of natural beauty, and working lands by removing development pressure and redirecting new growth to existing communities.

Benefits of Compact Growth

Helps decrease fossil fuel consumption. Increases economic productivity by creating an employment density that attracts additional investment. Improves productivity by providing businesses with easier access to labor, suppliers, and supporting businesses.

New Urbanism is an urban planning and design movement that began in the United States in the early 1980s. Its goals are to reduce dependence on the car, and to create livable and walkable, neighborhoods with a densely packed array of housing, jobs, and commercial sites.

Many of the best-known examples of New Urbanism are early greenfield developments like Seaside; Celebration, Florida; Harbor Town in Memphis, Tennessee; and Kentlands. New towns on greenfield sites continue to be built — more recent examples include New Town at St.

Smart growth is an approach to development that encourages a mix of building types and uses, diverse housing and transportation options, development within existing neighborhoods, and community engagement.

New Urbanism has been criticized for being a form of centrally planned, large-scale development, “instead of allowing the initiative for construction to be taken by the final users themselves”. It has been criticized for asserting universal principles of design instead of attending to local conditions.

Urbanism is the study of how inhabitants of urban areas, such as towns and cities, interact with the built environment. However, in some contexts internationally, urbanism is synonymous with urban planning, and urbanist refers to an urban planner.

Claude Fischer’s (1975, 1995) subcultural theory of urbanism is designed to explain how and why social relationships vary by size of population in settlements. According to the theory, urban life is bifurcated into public and private domains.

Significance of Urbanism

A city or a town is a place where food production is not the main contributor to the economy. City people cease to be self-sufficient and depend on the products or services of other (city or village) people. The division of labor is a mark of urban life.

As nouns the difference between urbanism and urbanity

is that urbanism is the study of cities, their geographic, economic, political, social and cultural environment while urbanity is behaviour that is polished, refined, courteous.

One can understand urbanism as the patterns of behaviour, relationships, modes of thinking that characterizes urban dwellers while urbanization is primarily understood as a process of movement of people from rural areas to urban areas by the virtue of which population as well as spatial boundary of a city grows.

Urbanism is the study of the characteristic ways of interaction of inhabitants of towns and cities (urban areas) with the built environment. It is a direct component of disciplines such as urban planning (the physical design and management of urban structures) and urban sociology (the study of urban life and culture).