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Tennessee
Growth Policy
| What
is "Smart Growth"? (*)
In
the late 1990s, some people are driving 50 miles or more to their
jobs and sitting in traffic for hours each day. Like generals
before battle, they plan their activities strategically before
leaving home. When they do pull out of their driveways, many people
see a transformed driveway, one that does not look like the place
where they settled just a few years ago. Farms are becoming housing-subdivisions
or shopping centers, small towns are becoming suburbs, suburbs
are becoming satellite cities, two-lane roads are becoming four-lane
highways. The phenomenon has become known by a single word:
sprawl.
Smart
growth is about finding ways to manage sprawl and improve
our total quality of life. But smart growth is not just about
sprawl.
It is also about: |
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Finding
new sources of economic vitality for rural towns and counties that
are spiraling downward with a loss of jobs, tax revenue, social
services and people. |
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Finding
ways to preserve the scenic beauty and other environmental assets
of places that have began to attract tourism, second-home, and retirement
development. |
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Rejuvenating
decaying cities and inner suburbs. |
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| Smart
growth, then,
is not about curtailing all growth. Instead, it is
about each community planning wisely for the future. |
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Sprawl:
Some Reasons to Be Concerned |
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Sprawl
sucks the life out of older downtowns and neighborhoods … |
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Sprawl
destroys community character and countryside … |
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Sprawl
reduces opportunities for face-to-face interaction among people,
thereby making it more difficult to create, or retain, a sense
of community … |
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Sprawl
forecloses alternatives to the automobile as a means of transport
… |
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Sprawl
leaves older cities and town with excessively high concentrations
of poor people social problems … |
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Source:
Constance E. Beaumont. 1996. Smart
States, Better Communities. Washington, DC: National Trust
for Historic Preservation, p. 264. |
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| (*)
This section has been taken from Smart
Growth for Tennessee Towns and Counties: A Process Guide by
Mary English, Jean Peretz, and Melissa Manderschied;University
of Tennessee, Knoxville; February 1999. |
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