Smart Growth's Blind Side

Abstract

Problem: For many cities and planners, adopting smart-growth sprawl-containing strategies is associated with the conversion of relatively inexpensive industrial-zoned land to land zoned for mixed-use commercial and residential redevelopment. This can weaken the urban economic base, reduce the supply of good-job producing land, and contribute to industrial-sector suburban sprawl.

Purpose: We expose smart growth's blind side by revealing the lack of attention to urban industrial redevelopment in planning practice. We expand the smart growth dialogue by describing a) the impacts on productive urban industrial land of adopting smart policies, and b) local government measures to protect urban industry while pursuing smart growth.

Methods: We review the recent local industrial policies of 14 cities and 10 practice-oriented smart growth publications with local economic development components to reveal the disconnect between urban industrial development and smart growth approaches. We compare elements of adopted local industrial policies from selected cities with commonly accepted smart growth principles to illuminate the challenges smart growth policies pose for protecting and revitalizing urban industrial areas.

Results and conclusions: Our review of cities initiating local industrial policies reveals that significant amounts of industrial land have been converted to other uses as cities pursued smart growth. The smart growth literature provides little to no acknowledgment of the need to coordinate urban industrial development practices with other mainstay smart growth activities. Although development pressures to convert industrial land to higher densities and other uses persist, the national economic crisis has led to a call for strengthening manufacturing. There has also been a decline in the nonindustrial infill development that epitomizes smart growth projects. Together these trends present opportunities and challenges for city and regional planners to change smart growth approaches.

Takeaway for practice: Industrial land is at risk in cities. Recent efforts to reduce this risk, such as explicit local policies to preserve industrial land and jobs while also pursuing smart growth, illustrate how challenging it is to attract new manufacturers and prevent further industrial decline in urban neighborhoods. Pursuing smart growth and sustainable urban industrial development should not be an either/or proposition, and requires approaches that explicitly safeguard productive urban industrial land and discourage industrial sprawl.

Keywords:

• urban manufacturing
• smart growth
• industrial sprawl
• local industrial policies

Acknowledgments

We wish to express our sincere appreciation for the many comments and suggestions for improving this article provided by Timothy Chapin, Randall Crane, and three anonymous referees. All errors and emissions remain our own.

Research support: This research was supported by the NSF Grant Program: CMMI–Materials Use: Science, Engineering, and Society (MUSES) Grant #0628190. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The Atlanta Development Authority also provided support.

Notes

1. APA's five broad themes for smart growth include a) planning structure, process, and regulation, b) transportation and land use, c) regional management and community building,d) social equity and community building, and (e) environmental protection and land conservation.

2. In earlier work, Downs (2001) grouped proponents into one of four groups: a) anti- or slow-growth advocates, and environmentalists, b) pro-growth advocates, c) inner-city advocates, and d) better-growth advocates.

3. The Appendix provides the relevant policy documents and responsible local economic development authorities for each of these cities.

4. The network is now referred to as the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (see http://svlg.org/).

5. See The Federal Role in Supporting Urban Manufacturing (Mistry & Bryron, 2011), and the Pratt Center for Community Development's recently announced commitment by the Clinton Global Initiative to support the Urban Manufacturing Alliance (http://www.clintonglobalinitiative.org/commitments/commitments_search.asp?id = 715707).