Smart Growth:
Building Livable Communities in the Age of the Internet

By John M. Eger, San Diego Union-Tribune, Sunday, January 24, 1999

 Vice President Al Gore recently launched a new ten-billion dollar bond program to make communities more livable. In an announcement at the America Institute of Architects Building, Gore laid out an aggressive campaign to fight urban sprawl, a political hot-button issue virtually everywhere throughout the United States.

Within the last few months, voters in New Jersey approved a measure to spend one billion over the next ten years to preserve undeveloped land; Arizona $220 million on open-space preservation, and in Maryland, Tennessee, states, cities and counties across the country, so-called "urban growth boundaries," are being put in place to stem urban sprawl, preserve open spaces, and control the cost of spiraling infrastructure development.

In California and the west, problems of sprawl are particularly acute. Author Tom Wolf in his latest novel A Man in Full, describes the Bay Area of California. "The only way you could tell you were leaving one community and entering another, was when the franchises started repeating, and you spotted another 7-11, another Wendy’s, another Costco, another Home Depot." Timothy Egan of the New York Times who covers the new politics of urban sprawl, was quick to point out that Wolf’s description of the Bay Area could be any metropolitan area in the country.

"Sprawl," "is a pattern of physical development characterized by the decentralization of land use," according to Anton C. Nelessen, requiring "the use of a private vehicle to move from one single zone use to another." He explains, "In the sprawl pattern, goods and services are scattered throughout the region. This arrangement requires elaborate road systems, to link all areas . . . This system, "that lacks centers, produces excessive congestion and waste" . . . The automobile is necessary for even the most basic of daily requirements, a quart of milk or a loaf of bread."

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, and one of the keynote speakers at San Diego’s second annual Cities of the Future conference hosted by SDSU’s Institute for Smart Communities, observed that "the least understood cost of sprawl - - although probably the most keenly felt - - has been the sacrifice of a sense of place, the idea that people and things exist in some sort of continuity, that we belong to the world physically and chronologically, and that we know where we are."

One of the paradoxes of our age is that the more high tech our world becomes, the more high touch; the more global, the more intensely local. It is also true that the more time we live and work in cyberspace, the more important real place becomes. Only recently -- and the Smart Growth initiative is evidence of that - - have communities awakened to the need to preserve and protect their sense of place, and renew their spirit of community.

The solutions to doing so, however, are not so clear. Putting in place urban growth boundaries, like Portland did over twenty years ago, has proven to be a wise but stop-gap effort. Steering state and federal infrastructure dollars to discourage sprawl and development in rural farmlands and areas that deserve preservation is another. Indeed, many states no longer provide funding for infrastructure projects outside specifically designated growth areas. But these measures alone don’t get to the heart of problem.

What we must do is recognize the value of our existing investments - - often downtown, and in historic areas of the community where as Kevin Starr, our State Librarian has put it, lies our city’s DNA. In those vital centers, we must steer both our public and private investments and encourage public/private partnerships, to renew and redevelop for an information age.

Part of this effort entails ending the "fiscalization" of land use, a new term coined to describe the extent to which tax-based concerns drive land use decisions. All too often, local officials fear that "if pushed too hard for alternatives to sprawl by requesting improvements in a development project, the developer or company involved will sue them or move on to the neighboring jurisdiction," according to Constance Beaumont in a "how-to" publication Smart States, Better Communities, produced for The National Trust for Historic Preservation. Beaumont explains that "given their heavy reliance on property taxes for local revenue, most municipal governments find it extremely difficult to say no to any new development, even if it means losing their identity and even their way of life."

Fortunately, a fundamental shift to a knowledge-based economy and society is fast becoming a reality. This movement in which wealth creation hinges on our ability to create knowledge-based information products, and ushers in a new era in which sophisticated electronic infrastructures allow a wide variety of government, business and institutional transactions to take place electronically, which in turn obviats the need for travel to and from the government agencies and other places of business.

Though the bubble may yet burst on Amazon.com and other inflated Internet-based stocks, Foerster Research out of Cambridge estimates that 3.2 trillion dollars of commercial transactions will take place on the Internet by the year 2002. The Internet and the World Wide Web, growing at fifteen percent per month worldwide, is being integrated into the marketing, information and communications strategies of nearly every major corporation, educational institution, political and charitable organization, community and government agency in the United States.

Unlike towns and cities of an earlier era which were built along railroads, waterways or interstate highways, these cities of the future - - smart communities if you will - - will be built along "information highways," broadband systems of communications connected to every home, office, school, library and health care facility in the region. Such systems naturally reduce our dependency on the automobile and technologies which pose threats to our environment, but should also stem the tide of urban growth, and save and protect our open spaces. Promoting such smart communities and planning such information infrastructures as the County of San Diego is doing through the outsourcing of all of its telecommunications and information operations, represent a major step toward building the smart and sustainable communities of tomorrow for San Diego.

Importantly too, such infrastructures we know, are what are needed to attract the knowledge industries of the new information-based economy. What we are also beginning to understand is the that smart and sustainable, or livable communities, also attract the knowledge workers who themselves are migrating to places like Portland with its urban growth boundary and Seattle with its lakes and trees and precious open spaces.

Downtowns seem to be a particularly attractive haven for redevelopment and attracting the multimedia industries. Denver, with its Beaux Arts Historic Court is halfway through a decade-long downtown investment of one billion dollars and three sports stadiums, an aquarium and urban shopping complex. According to a report by James Brooks, of the New York Times, Denver, "following retail and entertainment development downtown now earmarking one billion dollars in residential construction. The total of 1334 apartments are being built or converted downtown, more than the total of the last four years."

According to a recent study by the Bookings Institution, this is part of a national trend. With mixed-use zoning, libraries, shops and live/work lofts all within walking distance of one another, these communities are fast becoming the most livable communities in the Age of the Internet.

The San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation, the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce, and the San Diego Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, are proposing a new business coalition on infrastructure and growth. Such a powerful regional alliance is key to moving our region forward as a city of the future, a smart and sustainable community we all know we can and must have; not just to survive, but to succeed in what is fast becoming a global knowledge-based information economy and society.

John M. Eger, Van Deerlin Endowed Professor of Communications and Public Policy, is Executive Director of SDSU’s International Center for Communications.

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