Is Smart Growth Successful?

From the introduction to the report, available for purchase or as a free download online:

"This study defines 'smart growth' as a family of related policies with similar goals that have evolved over time. As such, the term refers not only to the latest incarnation of policies originally known as "land use control" and "growth management," among others, but also to the movement itself. This movement reflects a more or less continuous process of state land use policy development that began sometime before 1970 and continues today.

Although different states join or exit the smart growth movement

and policy priorities shift over time, the essential coherence

of these programs has persisted.

The antecedents of smart growth were environmentally driven, regional planning friendly land use programs that extended to the substate, state, and even federal levels, although proposals for national land use legislation were short-lived. Instead, national legislation focused on clean air, clean water, and coastal zone management, all of which required states to adopt a higher level of planning.

The roots of smart growth go back to the regionalists of the 1920s and national resource planning of the Progressive Era. But it was the seminal work of Fred Bosselman and David Callies (1971) in The Quiet Revolution in Land Use Control that marks the beginning of the smart growth movement we know today.