Smart Growth

Smart Growth is an approach to land development that features compact building design, mixes uses, minimizes energy use, and creates usable open space.  They are planned, designed, and built to be accessible on foot and by bicycle and transit, but just by car.

Smart Growth is the opposite of sprawl.  In addition to being used instead of sprawl, in can be used as a “retrofit” and replace an outdated, outmoded, ugly development.

Examples of sprawl include huge suburban residential subdivisions, giant apartment or condo complexes, office parks, enclosed malls, big box stores, and strip malls.  They always have vast, treeless, overbuilt parking lots.  They are difficult or impossible to reach on foot and challenging for transit authorities to serve.

The development community is slowly migrating to a Smart Growth approach, but certainly there are still hundreds — if not thousands — of sprawling developments gobbling up untouched green space in the US right now.

Look for more material in the space in the weeks to come.

Smart Growth Success

Here are some examples of places, near and far, that are good models for Smart Growth.

Gatlinburg, Tennessee

Lexington, Massachusetts

The Bookshelf

If you are interested in reading more about Smart Growth and related issues, please see my bookshelf.

Links

Some general resources on Smart Growth and mixed use, some of which are specific to Billerica:

Smart growth photos on Flickr

• The Billerica Master Plan
• Our regional planning agency is NMCOG and they wrote a Smart Growth Plan for Billerica
• About Smart Growth, a Massachusetts EOEA resourse
• Smart Growth Toolkit, from mass.gov
• Examples of Smart Growth projects in Massachusetts: Smart Growth Case Study Map
• US EPA Smart Growth page
• New England EPA Smart Growth page
• Smart Growth Network
• Smart Growth in Wikipedia