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Over at WestNorth, Payton wonders whether the critics of smart growth aren’t losing perspective:

“Innovation Briefs” has an editorial concluding (largely, it seems, on the basis of anecdotes and David Brooks’ awful generalizations) that “the most recent Census Bureau data, documenting demographic trends since the 2000 Census, suggest that the “smart growth” movement is having little influence on reshaping America’s urban landscape. The demographic and economic forces driving metropolitan expansion are too powerful to be reined in by the entreaties of smart growth advocates.”

Well, yes. “Smart growth” entered the lexicon in, oh, 1996 or so. It takes an achingly long time to stop a train, much less throw it into reverse, so one wouldn’t expect smart growth to have an immediately huge impact on the way Americans live.

I would add that in some ways the contest between “sprawl” and “smart growth” is not exactly a battle between comparable entities. No one is for “sprawl” in the way that planners and architects and onlookers and editorialists advocate smart growth as an antidote to the combination of market anarchy and ill-conceived policy that begets sprawl. So too does smart growth mean a panoply of responses: new urbanism, NIMBY obstructionism, city center development, other experiments in zoning. Smart growth might not have sufficient influence in part because it merely describes a general attitude and a diagnosis of the problem, not a specific solution.

That said, lately I’ve been a little more pessimistic after reading Joel Garreau’s Edge City (see Kevin Drum’s synopsis and review), a polemic against the dismissal of urbanized suburbs. Garreau points out that in so many ways edge cities are the locus of post-1980 economic and real estate development and that rather than compete with cities they have formed a symbiotic relationship with them. Furthermore, he argues, despite their dysfunctions Edge Cities have emerged because what preceded them, leafy residential suburbs, became less functional as women began to enter the workforce and as car traffic increased. But they of course have their drawbacks, and the large exurban sprawl extending past them seems even worse.

So I’ve been reflecting if there might be something to the Innovation Briefs/David Brooks/Joel Garreau line of critique. Brooks’ complaint seems mostly sociological, that suburbs and exurbs aren’t the stretch of mindless conformity and lack of social diversity that many still characterize them as. Fine, but that says nothing of the form that these communities take. Furthermore, if Brooks is right that demographics are trending to sprawl, that gives even more alarm to those concerned for the aesthetic appeal of our nation, the environment or even the health of a society that never walks more than forty feet.

The other critique is against the idealist bent of the smart growth movement. Not idealist as in misty-eyed, idealist as in Kantian. Against overwhelming economic forces, it offers volunteerism. Advocates ignore the economics of development and the sociology of communities. Communities adopting such measures seem limited to bourgeois inner-suburbs. These may not be fair characterizations, but it wouldn’t hurt to address them or think how we might be harder-headed in advocating for smart growth. I suspect it will take more than merely claiming that “smart growth is smart business.”

As a corollary, we should note that the Law of Unintended Consequences seems particularly applicable to housing markets and urban development. Rent control often stifles supply and drives up prices. What appear to be smart growth measures can end up encouraging sprawl elsewhere.

These critiques I don’t think are fatal. The drawbacks of sprawl, shoddy suburban development and of urban decline are too great for us to dismiss smart growth. And thinkers, activists and others associated with the movement continually give us valuable fodder for reflecting on our lived environment. For those locally, I’d recommend the Planning Livable Communities blog; nationally, there’s Smart Growth America and countless websites on new urbanism. Even if we don’t know the answer yet, we need more people asking the questions.