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Chapter 7 Replanting Urbanism in the 1990s: A Garden of Acronyms The city, suburbs, and the countryside must be viewed as a single, evolving system within nature, as must every individual park and building within that larger whole. . . . Nature in the city must be cultivated, like a garden, rather than ignored or subdued. —Anne Whiston Spirn, The Granite Garden, 1984 Three areas are each on the cusp of change: regionalism is a reality about to be born, the suburbs are rapidly maturing, and many inner-city neighborhoods are primed for rebirth. . . . The challenge is to clarify the connections and shape both the neighborhood and region into healthy, sustainable forms—into Regional Cities. —Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton, The Regional City, 2001 The decade of the 1990s saw the beginning of the end for top-down urbanism­ described in parts I and II. The Patrician Decades with their well-meaning aesthetic pretensions had long receded into planning history textbooks by 1990, though many individual patricians continued to play key roles in devising and funding new urban agendas, such as the many urban greening projects spearheaded by New York’s mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Likewise, the postwar hegemony of technocrats that decimated the nation’s older cities while driving the suburban sprawl engine receded in its unquestioned authority—most dramatically signaled by the demise of New York’s Westway project in the mid-1980s, which I discuss in ­8. No single earth-shaking event, however, marked the gradual “sea change” from top-down, command urban policies to a more grassroots, pluralistic, and humane urbanism. Rather, this subtle transition has involved a series of loosely connected new laws, policies, and paradigms (“garden of acronyms”) beginning in the early 1990s whose effects have been unfolding to the present time. The Smart Growth and New Urbanist movements that evolved in the 1990s rode the crest of the breaking wave of frustration with the technocratic focus on the automobile, suburban sprawl, and separation of residential and commercial uses. While retaining an “­ expert-driven” perspective (as a marketing tool), Smart Growth ­ arguably 158 Chapter 7­ provided a segue from the “one-size-fits-all” era before the 1990s to the more homegrown approaches that have proliferated ever since. Smart Growth and New Urbanism With striking symmetry, the twentieth century opened and closed with a surge of urban evangelism. As the City Beautiful movement stirred mainstream progressivism in the early 1900s, Smart Growth and its cousin New Urbanism dominated the hearts and minds of urban practitioners at the century’s close. But Smart Growth, broadly speaking, is as different from City Beautiful as the computer age from the era of the telegraph. If experience is a demanding teacher, the “movers and shapers” of the nation’s cities have absorbed many lessons since the heyday of technocratic urban renewal and suburban sprawl. The Smart Growth canon reflects the early insights of heretical “seers of the sixties” like Lewis Mumford, Kevin Lynch, William H. Whyte, Jane Jacobs, and Ian McHarg concerning sprawl, transportation, neighborhoods, open space, walkability, and scale. To these were added concepts from the 1970s and 1980s, such as growth management, affordable housing, mixed-use development, infill and brownfield redevelopment, transit-oriented development (TOD), low impact development (LID), and other strategies. In a radical departure from the Technocrat Decades, Smart Growth America (SGA)—the movement’s central dynamo based in Washington, DC—focuses on neighborhoods rather than “downtown”: At the heart of the American dream is the simple hope that each of us can choose to live in a neighborhood that is beautiful, safe, affordable and easy to get around. Smart growth does just that. Smart growth creates healthy communities with strong local businesses. Smart growth creates neighborhoods with schools and shops nearby and low-cost ways to get around for all our citizens. Smart growth creates jobs that pay well and reinforces the foundations of our economy. Americans want to make their neighborhoods great, and smart growth strategies help make that dream a reality.1 There is a slight whiff of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in this statement, but the goals that it reflects are a welcome contrast to the downtown fixation of city boosters of the past century. In another contrast to earlier attempts to “manage growth,” Smart Growth deemphasizes land use regulation as a tool for achieving its mission. Invigorated by a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court,2 property rights advocates since the 1990s have stigmatized public regulation of land use as “command...

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