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Urban Sustainability through Smart Growth pp 45–61Cite as

Theory: A City-Regional Geography of Multiple Orders

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Part of the book series: The Urban Book Series ((UBS))

Abstract

The pursuit of urban sustainability through smart growth programs, policies, and projects—the subject of this book—raises wider theoretical questions about how we should map the highly variegated ways in which regional planning strategies ultimately (re)shape urban form, in Greater Seattle or indeed any other city-regional environment. In particular, are the spaces that smart growth (helps to) make sustainable or unsustainable or in fact both at the same time, albeit unevenly across metropolitan space? This chapter discusses smart growth as a syncretic normative planning theory for regional (re)development, covering literatures that seek to define its key aspirational traits as well as its major territorial impacts in applied practice at various scales of governance. The chapter then turns to the concept of “intercurrence,” deployed from the field of American Political Development (APD), for theoretical inspiration. Intercurrence, it is argued, highlights the inevitable “abrading” of multiple orders at any given site, allowing us to reconsider the uneven geopolitical-economies of smart growth as a contested form of American territorial governance. Rather than wholly dismiss or uncritically celebrate smart growth through radical, liberal, or progressive ontologies, respectively, intercurrence foregrounds the multiplicities of consciously organized space.

How do we explain and evaluate the typical outcomes of planning so far?

—Susan Fainstein (2005, p. 121)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Center for Tax Justice reports that between 2008–2012 the Boeing Corporation, for example, made total profits of $20.5 billion, but actually had a Federal income tax rate of −1.0 %. See http://www.ctj.org/corporatetaxdodgers/sorrystateofcorptaxes.pdf (p. 51).

  2. 2.

    A Seattle-based example is Redmond, WA, the home of Microsoft, which has IZ policies. See: https://redmond.gov/PlansProjects/ComprehensivePlanning/RedmondCommunityIndicators/Choices/HousingAffordability/.

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  1. Urban Studies Program, University of Washington, Tacoma, Tacoma, Washington, USA

    Yonn Dierwechter

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Dierwechter, Y. (2017). Theory: A City-Regional Geography of Multiple Orders. In: Urban Sustainability through Smart Growth. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54448-9_3

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