September 2007 · Volume 89 · Number 8

Smart Growth: The Opportunity for Managers to Lead

by Rick Cole

We are living at a time of cataclysmic global change. For the first time in human history, a majority of the world’s people now live in cities. America passed that same milestone a century ago, during a time of tumultuous urban change that gave birth to the local government management profession.

Local managers in America today don’t directly confront the profound economic, political, and environmental challenges of cities like Nairobi, Jakarta, Shanghai, or Baghdad. But our generation’s legacy will be the model we set for the rest of the planet.

For the global population to live the way we do in the United States, for example, the world would have to produce 500 percent more energy. The world would have to add another two billion cars to the billion already on the road for the rest of humanity to get around the way we do. The world would have to plan and build another Atlanta metro area from scratch every month of every year for developing nations to use land the way we do.

When Herbert Stein was chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, he pointed out the inescapable: “Things that are unsustainable always come to a stop.”

The Implications

How we manage our communities can no longer be measured in strictly local terms. How we grow in and around Seattle or Virginia Beach or El Paso affects more than the quality of life of local residents. It influences more than just the bottom line for local economies. It has implications beyond the environmental impacts on local watersheds. Our decisions shape the future of the human race at a time when the population of the world’s cities is increasing by more than 150,000 people every single day.

So what are Americans doing about the way we live? The critique of suburban sprawl is as familiar to us as traffic jams and high gas prices. The spread of placeless sprawl, the disinvestment in central cities, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of farmland and wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built heritage are called “one interrelated community-building challenge” in the preamble of the charter of the New Urbanism (www.cnu.org/charter). Public officials, planners, architects, environmentalists, developers, public health professionals, and advocates for urban vitality are increasingly embracing smart growth.

There are also powerful countervailing forces. Free market and property rights advocates condemn smart growth as government interference in the marketplace. Many local residents resist such elements of smart growth as mixing land uses, building transit, increasing densities, or changing conventional zoning codes.

As managers, we should be at the center of the smart growth debate. But not as political advocates, which is antithetical to all our professional instincts and ethics; instead, we have the opportunity to live up to what the ICMA Code of Ethics calls our “deep sense of social responsibility” by embracing the opportunity to be community builders.

If we were simply managers charged with overseeing day-to-day operations of local services, we could defer to elected policymakers to chart the future evolution of America’s communities. We could cede responsibility to implement their plans and policies to our planners and community development professionals. But managers have always had a higher calling, forged from the urban crisis that created our profession.

In the early days of our profession, communities led the world in industrial production and dynamic innovation, but they were also chaotic, corrupt, and unhealthy. Lincoln Steffens’s book, The Shame of the Cities, shocked the nation and opened the door to professional managers applying what the ICMA code calls “a constructive, creative, and practical attitude” to the stark challenges of that time. We inherit that legacy of courageous engagement.

We can lead again. Here are seven ways that local government managers can introduce and implement best practices for smart growth in their communities:

1. Start with a strategic vision.

Steven Covey wisely advises to “start with the end in mind.” The world is becoming “flatter”—making it easier for the rest of the world to directly compete with American communities. This will put a premium on what urbanist Joel Kotkin calls “a unique identity and sense of place.” If talented people and investment can flow freely, places that build on their strengths will have a competitive advantage over generic cities and suburbs. Fostering such a distinctive brand comes from a broad and deep consensus that can only come from an intentional and concerted effort to define a vision and work collaboratively to achieve that vision over the long term.

2. Think and act holistically.

Too often, smart growth is seen as simply a planning or a community development concern, instead of as a communitywide goal. Take streets. Making them work starts with width and design—and that means public works and the fire department working collaboratively with the planners. But great streets are clean, safe, and attractive so police and public works are again integral. Managers are in a unique position to foster shared goals across department and specialty silos.

3. Rewrite the rules.

When planners refer to “Euclidean zoning” they don’t mean that zoning was invented by the Greek mathematician. “Euclid” was the name of the 1920s Supreme Court case legalizing zoning. The court upheld “excluding from residential areas the confusion and danger of fire, contagion, and disorder, which in greater or less degree attach to the location of stores, shops, and factories.”

Our rigid segregation of complementary daily functions into zones that must be connected by auto trips is programmed into virtually every line of every existing zoning code and public works standard. This means you can’t create or re-create great places until you completely rewrite or replace those codes and standards. It would be tedious work if there weren’t promising models to adopt and adapt. Challenge your planners and public works officials to pursue emerging best practices for form-based codes and balanced street, parking, and fire safety standards.

4. Align the way you do business.

Too often, even a far-sighted strategic vision report sits on the shelf with other long-range and technical plans. The strategic vision should set clear goals. Then it’s our job as managers to establish clear measures to keep us on track and accountable for achieving those goals. In turn, we must organize our staffs and prioritize our budgets around our goals. By making smart growth the centerpiece of how we do business, everyone knows what success looks like and works together to achieve it.

5. Create models.

Nothing is more powerful than tangible examples of “smarter” growth. It might be a new neighborhood with a centrally located park, rear alleys and ample sidewalks to improve walkability, and a mix of different kinds and prices of homes. It might be corridor streetscape improvements that foster more transit and pedestrian usage. It might be revitalizing an older neighborhood with a sensitive infill project. It might be forcing an auto-oriented retailer to change its site design to put the front door on the street instead of the parking lot. But in this transitional period, it is important not to let the “perfect” be the enemy of the good. When people begin to see better examples of growth, it can ease their apprehensions and expedite the next project.

6. Learn as you go.

A smart growth approach is not static. Tours, conference attendance, and in-house training, as well as evaluations of projects and processes after they are completed, contribute to a tone of continuous improvement. During the past 60 years, we’ve been building a landscape for cars. We need to rediscover old traditions for human-scale places. But we also need to reinvent current practices to accommodate the world we live in today—and the world we want to live in tomorrow. This doesn’t mean banning cars. Instead, it means using them in ways that promote, not destroy, the urban fabric. Creating great places is hard and challenging work—and textbook answers are less valuable than real life experience.

7. Think globally and regionally, act locally.

As local government managers, we are tempted to define our world by our jurisdictional borders. But these lines artificially divide far more important linkages of regional economies, watersheds, commuter patterns, and demographics. Smart growth is by its nature comparative and contextual. Participating in regional institutions and processes provides participants with comparisons that enrich their understanding of local context.

A residential tower might make a great deal of sense above a subway stop in Manhattan or San Francisco. It is mindlessly out of place next to a freeway off-ramp surrounded by low-density suburbia. Smart growth should be all about “a place for everything and everything in its place.” This can come about only when people have not only a sophisticated understanding of regional context but also a collaborative framework for coordinating how neighboring jurisdictions grow.

By the same standard, in any but the smallest hamlet, there is no one size that fits all—each intervention should be carefully calibrated to the local context. Rear alleys, front porches, and traditional architecture don’t make a smart growth or new urbanist project if the housing is built far from transit, jobs, stores, and schools. Reinforce the global and regional framework and insist on finding the right fit for the local context.

Managers have broad responsibilities—and varying expectations from the elected officials and communities they serve. Our core competencies for providing efficient services also embrace making great places. We shortchange ourselves and our profession if we hold ourselves aloof from the central issues of our times, especially as they play out in local governments around the world.

“Building great communities is ultimately what our job is about,” Palo Alto, California, City Manager Frank Benest notes. “Smart growth is one of the few overarching concepts that touches every aspect of achieving that goal. It may seem like a softer and fuzzier framework than, say, performance measurement, yet it has a powerful tangible impact in expanding a community’s economic base, increasing local government revenue, reducing infrastructure costs, and bringing diverse interests together around not only an improved standard of living, but a far healthier quality of life.”

The world is changing. We can lead or we can follow. We can’t hide. Finding creative and practical local solutions is what we are all about.

We have hard work ahead. We can all take heart from the legacy of public service enunciated by President Kennedy when he declared, “I do not shrink from this responsibility, I welcome it. The energy, the faith, the devotion we bring to this cause will light our country and all who serve it. And the glow from that fire can truly light the world.”

Rick Cole is city manager, Ventura, California (RCole@ci.ventura.ca.us).

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