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- Info
Growth management: Issues, techniques and policy implications
| Author: |
Burrows, Lawrence B. |
| Date: |
1978 |
| Periodical: |
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, Center for Urban Policy Research |
| Abstract: |
There are specific topics which, in microcosm, bring together many of the strands of a whole society. The pressures at work in responding to the problems involved in these topics both in implementing and retarding their resolution, provide a unique insight into the strains of our time. In many ways, the subject of growth controls is a prime exemplar of this species. Grouped under this rhubric are all the environmental concerns which are increasingly prominent: the natural limits of land-holding capacity, the trade-offs between intensive land use, and the physical limitations of earth and space. But these elements, while far from easily defined, are much more finite than the particulars at the other end of the spectrum that of the character and individual substance and way of life, which revolve around the level of intensity of land use. For example, as we near the end of the twentieth century, an increasing demand is heard for a return to a simpler, more bucolic environment. Just as the suburb replaced the city as the prime locational target so the suburb in. turn finds it very difficult to compete against the lures of the countryside. The drive toward exurbia, and with it greater levels of decentralization-if not socialatomization-becomes a dominent theme, at least for the affluent. Lodged precariously between these poles are innumerable other parameters that must be reconciled. To name just a few is to slight the vigor of the many, but given that risk, let me mention at the very least the aspirations for lebensraum of minority groups seeking their place in the suburban sun; of the new home aspirant who finds that land costs make the most potent of rewards in our society, the private home, a more and more difficult target; of people who have bought land under the presumption that they can build on it in a fashion which will maximize its value only to have value dissipated by local authorities desperate to minimize development; of the older home occupant dismayed by the taxes reflective of growth and no growth. All these and many other elements are at work within the simple title of Growth Control. How are these elements to be reconciled and yet provide a modicum of equity for the several players both within current times and the future? It is this very important question to which this work is addressed. In it, Larry Burrows, our former student and colleague, provides the crucial tools and methods of planning, of allocation technique, and the like. The resolution of the long-range philosophical and political questions must remain for later workers-within a society less irresolute than our own. |
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