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Smart Growth From the Environmental Perspective

Posted by: Tim Halbur

5 January 2010 - 5:00am

Kaid Benfield of the NRDC reviews The Smart Growth Manual by Andres Duany, Jeff Speck and Mike Lydon. Benfield gives it high marks for style and substance, and for the way it incorporates environmental issues.

As an environmentalist, Benfield expected to disagree with more of the book than he did.

"The region is probably the scale at which smart growth advocates and new urbanists sometimes tend to disagree; smart growth advocates seek compact regional footprints and are suspicious of the new urbanist transect that (grossly oversimplified) seems to sanction some form of new development just about anywhere on private land. We tend to be more prescriptive at the regional scale and more permissive at the neighborhood scale, compared to new urbanists, who are just the opposite.

But I really like The Smart Growth Manual’s approach to regional thinking and planning."

Full Story: The Smart Growth Manual: a Review
Source: NRDC Blog, January 4, 2010
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By monitoring these sorts of time-based changes, planners and policymakers could potentially take on a better understanding of how places change and what patterns might be causing urban problems.
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