The fall political extravaganza referred to as “the election process” placed a spot light on the precarious position of democracy in America. The mean-spirited campaigns, the low voter turn-out and the evaporated hope for significant progress on tax reform, mobility, governance restructuring and prosperity cause one to pine for the days when Alexis de Tocqueville found democracy in the United States a stimulating subject to explore. 

 

For many, the confusion over “growth” (smart-, slow-, no-, robust- or sustainable) will have the longest-term negative impact. According to media reports, “slow growth” advocates lost in some jurisdictions (e.g., Loudoun County) while in others, “slow growth” advocates won (e.g., Prince William and Fauquier Counties). In much of the Commonwealth, any “growth” would be welcome, but where growth is a possibility, it is misunderstood and confusingly characterized.

 

First, Let's Get a Handle on the Speed of Growth

 

Fast growth: As Edward Abbey has made it famously clear, “fast growth” is a dead end –- “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Whether in a smokers' lungs or in “the second fastest-

growing county in the United States,” fast growth is not sustainable, period. Nearly everyone agrees with that reality.

 

No growth: “No growth” gets citizens to the same place. No growth is stagnation, and in an organic system such as human settlement patterns, that is the equivalent of decay and eventual death. There are abandoned, dilapidated buildings and ghost towns all over middle America that bear mute testimony to this fact.

 

An intelligent, middle ground: So, what we need is a smart, intelligent, rational, sustainable, middle ground with respect to the speed of “growth.”

 

Growth of What?

 

Media speak has deprived the debate over growth of most substantive content. Growth of what is an overlooked question.

 

Population? No, on a global scale; there are already too many people. The region, nation-state or continent with the most mouths to feed, educate and protect is not the winner.

 

Consumption? No, it is not possible to support contemporary levels of per capita consumption, even with a smaller population, if the current levels of consumption at the top of the food chain are extended to a broader population. Economic expansion driven by escalating consumer consumption is not sustainable growth. Once the genies of education, equality and global communication are out of the bottle, it is not possible to limit mobility, choice and safety to a select few in any region or to a select few nation states. Take your choice: Either brutal totalitarian dictatorships on the one hand, or smaller, less consumptive democracies on the other.

 

Urbanized land? No, there is already vastly more land devoted to urban uses than can be used in a sustainable way. Even if sustainability is not yet a front hook concern for many, there is too much land already urbanized to optimize the functionality or value of urban property for the benefit of any region’s residents.

 

Happy and safe? The only quantitative measure of growth that makes sense is the one Aristotle articulated over 2,000 years ago. A smaller population that consumes less per capita but is happy and safe is the best and most viable measure of intelligent growth. We call this “prosperity within sustainable (aka, functional) human settlement patterns.”

 

Growth Where?

 

Next, let’s understand that the core issue concerning growth is location, location, location, not absolute or even relative speed.

 

It turns out a lot of the confusion about growth exists because there are two fundamentally different configurations of growth. Which formulation is intelligent depends on location:

 

- Inside the Clear Edge

 

- Outside the Clear Edge

(See "Beyond the Clear Edge," May 26, 2003 for an exploration of the Clear Edge around the core (aka, Urbanside) of every New Urban Region and also the Clear Edges around the urban enclaves that exist in and support the Countryside.)

 

Inside the Clear Edge. Inside the Clear Edge, growth of economic, social and physical activity has to be as fast as possible to achieve (and then fast enough to maintain) a relative balance of jobs/housing/services/

recreation/amenity (J/H/S/R/A) at the community-scale.

 

A sustainable New Urban Region is by definition an organic agglomeration of human activity made up of Balanced Communities that achieve a balance of J/H/S/R/A.  

 

Community economic growth rates are a derivative of regional growth because the New Urban Region is the fundamental building block of contemporary society. The regional economic growth rate is directly related to nation-state and global rates of economic growth.

 

Communities can alter their social and physical growth rates more easily than their economic growth rate. In addition, optimizing social and physical growth has a beneficial impact on communities’ economic growth within regional parameters. 

 

Outside the Clear Edge. Outside the Clear Edge, there must be “ungrowth” in the sense that urban uses are extracted from the Countryside and relocated within Urbansides. These urban places include both Urbansides, made up of communities that form the urban area around the core of a region, and the small Urbansides that exist within and support the Countryside with urban activity. 

 

This relocation need not be a forced relocation. It should be an enlightened, voluntary relocation that occurs as a result of allocating the cost of scattering urban uses across the Countryside to those who create and/or benefit from these settlement patterns. The urban services needed to support contemporary society are far more expensive for scattered urban uses outside the Clear Edge than they are for the same uses inside the Clear Edge. That is why the Clear Edge is an essential economic, social and physical imperative.

 

What, then, is intelligent, balanced growth? It is rational, sustainable economic, social and physical expansion inside the Clear Edge. This growth is essential to achieve happy, safe citizens. There are many needs to be filled: mobility, affordable housing, expanded educational opportunities, meaningful jobs, repair of past environmental derogation, creation and maintenance of useable and accessible open space, and on and on. All this requires a healthy economy with prosperous citizens and organizations in a socially stable, physically sustainable environment.

 

Outside the Clear Edge -- in other words, outside the urbanized area at a region's core and the urbanized enclaves in the Countryside -- intelligent growth is “ungrowth.” Ungrowth means reversing the trend of the last 80-plus years of abandoning potentially great places in the Urbanside and scattering urban land uses in the Countryside. (See "Wild Abandonment," September 8, 2003, and "Scatteration," Septermber 25, 2003) in Bacon's Rebellion.

 

The Privileged Few

 

I can hear it now. Some are saying: “Wait just a damn minute! Isn’t this just pandering to the desires of the privileged few?”

 

No, it is the opposite. In fact, protecting the Countryside through Reverse Growth, or ungrowth, is a painless and intelligent income/prosperity/opportunity redistribution that essential to preserving democracy in the United States. Let’s consider two overarching principles and then the equitable accommodation that reflects economic and physical reality:

 

In the great American tradition of being able to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor, or the luck of being born into the right family, the well-to-do should be able to enjoy living in countryside unsullied by scattered urban land uses.

(As an aside, I would note that all those who live in the Urbansides benefit from the existence of viable and sustainable Countryside as pointed out in Scatteration, but that is not the only benefit, as noted below.)

 

Pursuant to an equally important American tradition of paying for what you get, those who enjoy living in the Countryside should pay the total cost of their location decisions.

Here is how these two principles are accommodated in a sustainable context outside the Clear Edges: 

 

Those who provide the food, fiber and recreation trade the hard work of maintaining the Countryside for the privilege of living there. Food, fiber and recreation is what the Countryside has provided since urban places started evolving 8,000 years ago. 

 

We now know that the Industrial Revolution’s impact on agriculture, forestry and other non-urban (extensive) uses of land requires different farm and forest strategies. We also know that well over 95 percent of the population is urban and requires urban services. 

 

Urban citizens have the “right” to live in low-density isolation and splendor so long as they pay the full cost for that privilege. Dwellings in the Countryside that are in fact scattered, low-density urban land uses must pay the full cost of the urban services they consume. The service requirements for happy and safe citizens can be provided much less expensively inside the Clear Edges, as noted above. Those whose location decisions raise the cost of those services should pay the true, total cost, not the charges currently subsidized by other taxpayers. This means that those who choose to live lightly on the land and consume few of the 40 +/- urban services required to support contemporary life pay a smaller amount because services are based on equitable user fees. Those who generate a lot of cost pay a higher toll.  

 

This is the arrangement a well-governed society must create in order to have the resources necessary to pay for mobility, affordable and accessible housing, good schools, accessible openspace and other public and private goods and services. 

 

When urban citizens living in the Countryside are required to pay the full, equitable costs for the goods and services they receive, they will soon learn that spreading out into the Countryside is much less attractive. Many will decide not to pay for expensive urban services, and to live, work and play where those services can be more efficiently. As they move back, organizations in urban areas will benefit from their contributions in time and participation in the maintenance of a civil society.   

 

Urban residents scattered in the Countryside will either voluntarily move back to the Urbanside around the region’s core, or they will help recreate the viable urban enclaves that historically existed in the Countryside.  These urban enclaves collectively form “balanced but disaggregated communities” that support a sustainable Countryside.

 

Where to From Here?

 

In the simplistic and confusing world of media-speak, citizens and governance practitioners have fallen into debates with meaningless buzz words. “Slow growth” is among the worst. “Slow growth” homogenizes what should happen inside the Clear Edge with what should happen outside the Clear Edge. The result is a meaningless mishmash which we term “dysfunctional human settlement patterns” and which some call “sprawl.” The result is the root cause of traffic congestion, rising service costs, deteriorating levels of service and the other ills that generate heat during the election season.

 

Slow growth is not intelligent growth nor a sustainable strategy. It is a duck for cover, and let-things-go-to-

hell-in-a-handbasket s-l-o-w-l-y strategy. “By the time things get really bad here, I will move somewhere else.” The question is where? Perhaps Australia, where a Clear Edge between Urbanside and Countryside is national policy.