Theories of Urban Growth, Sustainability, and Transparent Development

Abstract

Starting with the core argument that dense, diverse, and well-planned American urban environments offer myriad sustainability benefits lacking in low-density suburban environments, this chapter presents a novel theoretical approach to sustainability that transcends purely technological or idealistic solutions for sustainable urban development and engages directly with urban policy and political economy perspectives. Defining sustainability specifically in terms of the “growth paradigm” that undergirds the evolution of social-ecological systems, the chapter identifies sustainability as an ongoing shift from quantitative growth to qualitative development. It reviews sustainability arguments related to the dematerialization and regionalization of economic processes, identifies sustainability’s continued debt to notions of “localism” and “sense of place,” and elaborates an ideal of “transparency” in the relationships between producers and consumers. While dense, transparent urban development is lauded as more sustainable in theory, critical perspectives on the political economy of property development illustrate the cultural, political, and structural barriers to creating such environments in practice. Entrenched policies and practices that define property value in terms of monetary transactions, rather than locally negotiated uses, enable land speculation, non-local property ownership, and private monetization of government regulatory power. The theory and real-world functioning of speculative practices in local property markets are reviewed in particular to emphasize the ways in which speculation harms the transparency of urban development processes. Sustainability and critical theory approaches to development, while fundamentally divergent, commonly emphasize the importance of tangible producer-consumer and person-place relationships, offering a compromise vision for future urban sustainability initiatives.