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National
New Partners for Smart Growth Conference Wraps Up in New Orleans
The failure of most of American planning efforts over the past 30
years has instilled a public fear of development -- pursued at a
rate faster than population growth, with no concern for local
character, congestion and overall livability -- said nationally
known New Urbanist Andres Duany in his keynote speech at the 2nd
Annual New Partners for Smart Growth Conference in New Orleans, LA,
stressing, ''It's gotten so bad that people like to protect a potato
field from development because they'd rather have that than a
shopping center,'' but seeing solutions in well-explained, locally
tailored and skillfully implemented policies of smart growth. Such
great cities of the 1920s as Coral Gables, FL; Beverly Hills, CA;
Shaker Heights, OH; and Forest Hills, NY, created a strong sense of
community and improved adjacent areas, Duany said. Pointing out
that smart growth policies of mass transit, street grids and
walkability could reinvigorate not only urban cores but entire
cities and that polls by his developer clients found between 30 and
60 percent of respondents willing to live in ''smart growth'
communities if they could, he called for incentives for developers
to help them satisfy this scarcely tapped market. That is still
difficult, said earlier New Orleans Regional Planning Commission
planning director Jim Harvey, noting that in the fast-growing St.
Tammany Parish on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain ''the words
'smart growth' became a kind of demon.'' Nevertheless, he is
optimistic that politicians will recognize the economic benefits of
smart growth, especially the much lower costs of urban
redevelopment in comparison with the costly construction of roads
and water and sewer lines for fringe subdivisions. But one Tammany
smart growth advocate, Covington Mayor Keith Villere, who often
defines suburbia as places ''where they tear out the trees and then
name the streets after them,'' remains concerned that the parish's
New Directions 2025 planning effort ''is just going to pretty up
sprawl'' rather than seek fundamental land use changes. And with New
Orleans Mayor Bobby Simpson's Smart Growth Task Force still trying
to define the term, North Carolina's Charlotte Republican Mayor
Patrick McCrory told the audience he usually skips the definition
and instead uses pictures of historic neighborhoods with nice
streets, sidewalks and parks to illustrate ''good growth'' -- places
''where you bring visitors'' -- and pictures of strip malls,
fast-food franchises and ragged infrastructure to illustrate ''crap.''
Politicians, he said, should look critically on new road and
subdivision projects, then ask themselves, ''Fifty years from now,
will it make sense?''
2/2/2003
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