CenLamar

Around two weeks ago, a friend of mine directed me to an article in the LA Weekly about how some developers have misused “smart growth” concepts to attract federal incentives to help subsidize sprawl developments, including strip malls and suburban subdivisions. Today, I noticed that fellow Cenla blogger, CenLaugh, also came across the same article, and he offers some analysis regarding the application and implementation of smart growth in Alexandria.

To be sure, CenLaugh is correct when he states that the term “smart growth” is now in common currency here in Alexandria. He writes:

It is possible that this term may have run it’s course, and it is time to coin a new phrase for the administration. There are many others that you may see in the new future and some may have been used already. Here are some examples of what other terms may be beaten to death in the near future when allotting more money to useless projects. New Urbanism, New Pedestrianism, Urban Sprawl ( I think this one has been used, maybe not on a local level though).

It is worth noting that, here in Alexandria, the term “community-based planning” has often been used in place of “smart growth,” but this is not necessarily due to the fact that “smart growth” has been overused or exploited. Indeed, unlike many other places in the United States, Alexandria is only recently discussing what smart growth means and how it can be implemented.

In order to avoid a situation in which developers can exploit “smart growth” concepts, it is critical that we all understand what exactly smart growth means– because it isn’t simply a rhetorical device or an abstraction.

Smart growth and New Urbanism seek a new approach to city planning, and in many cases, this requires cities to completely rewrite their codes and ordinances. Truth be told: New Urbanism isn’t so “new.” It’s actually based on the way people planned cities for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The birth and maturity of the Interstate Highway System and America’s subsequent reliance on automobile-centric transportation led to a host of changes in the way Americans planned cities; these changes were codified, making it much more difficult for developers to plan “traditional neighborhoods.”

To paraphrase Jim Kunstler, the author of The Geography of Nowhere, cities seemed to care more about the driver and less about the kid riding their bicycle to school. Automobile-centric planning means wider roads, more lanes, fewer sidewalks.

But it’s much more than that. We need to each, independently, read about smart growth, and if community-based planning is to occur, all Alexandrians must consider themselves as “stakeholders” in our future.

More later…