How Smart Growth Lost Its Way, The Atlantic Cities, April 24, 2012

In this article, Kaid Benfield argues that placemaking is more than meeting the numbers, although they must be met to achieve the quantitative goals of "smart growth."  She highlights the qualitative factors that make "smart growth" smart placemaking.  Here are some excerpts:

I want to follow up on yesterday's article about placemaking.  Reacting to an excellent essay by Ethan Kent, I posited that that the creation and strengthening of great places - great people habitat, if you will - should be a very important part of a “new environmentalism."  Indeed, I wrote that to a great extent it already is, having been taking hold at least since sometime in the 1990s. Today, I would like to take that point further and argue that great placemaking should also become a very important part of, or even a possible successor to, what we have been calling "smart growth." I don't think that it is currently an important part of the smart growth agenda, unfortunately, or that it is to nearly the degree that it should be. . .

. . . We now have oodles of research quantifying the benefits of smart growth to the environment. If we build this way, we will reduce carbon emissions, air pollution, land consumption, and water runoff compared to a continuation of the sprawl paradigm that shaped our landscape in the last half of the 20th century. We have to do this.
And yet. Something has been nagging me about smart growth for years. I believe that, at least for those of us in the policy world, the smart growth agenda has become a bit formulaic and even clinical . . .

. . .  the fact that we are increasing dwelling units per acre, reducing vehicle miles traveled per capita, and reducing tons of carbon emissions compared to sprawl does not mean that we are making great people habitat. We may be creating smart growth, while in some cases doing little for people or doing less for the natural environment than we could be. . .

Our communities of the future must not only reduce carbon emissions, save land, and encourage use of transit, walking and bicycling. They must also contain beauty, warmth, places of solitude and reflection. They must be significantly more dense than sprawl, but also sometimes forego additional increments of density in order to maintain light, limit noise, provide privacy, and respect a human scale. They must be conducive to engaging the intellect and the spirit. . . . .

Click here to read the rest of this excellent article.