The spaces that smart growth makes: sustainability, segregation, and residential change across Greater Seattle

Abstract

Sometimes interwoven in metropolitan practice, the discourses of sustainability, smart growth, and New Urbanism (NU) share a number of policy assumptions about the appropriate geographical anatomy of regulatory regimes and infrastructure investments. An important research question is how these policy assumptions relate empirically to extant geographies of racial and economic segregation within specific metropolitan regions. This paper addresses this question with empirical reference to Greater Seattle, one of the country’s most important “containment” regimes in which sustainability, smart growth, and NU are each valorized public policy agendas. Using residential permit data in the 1990s and 2000s, the analysis highlights the heterogeneous nature of the emergent landscapes of smart growth. In the new morphology of smart growth landscapes, density, (de)segregation, class, race, land recycling, regional-scale compactness, and other key dynamics appear to be combining in complex and at times surprising ways.