University of California Transportation Center

At the risk of appearing fashionable, I decided to stick “smart growth” in the title of my talk. I confess this is because I find smart growth to be a nice shorthand for “transport and land-use integration”. Stripped to its essentials, smart growth is mainly about better coordinating and integrating transportation and land development. “Smart growth” is a compressed (two-syllable) way of saying this.

In the United States, “smart growth” has gained a momentum of its own, fueled by progressive legislation in states like Maryland and Florida which ties infrastructure dollars to land-use management. No longer just a local issue, smart-growth rhetoric is today even heard on the national campaign trail.