What Does 'Smart Growth' Really Mean? Questions for Andres Duany

By co-writing 2000's Suburban Nation, Andres Duany established himself among the leading minds in a movement to encourage American cities to abandon suburban sprawl in favor of communities centered on pedestrians, public space and freedom from reliance on cars. That text identified a problem in American development, and his—The Smart Growth Manual, co-written with Jeff Speck and Mike Lydon—offers a plainly written set of solutions. One idea per page takes the reader through a 180-point crash course on everything from regional transportation planning to neighborhood sidewalk width, with geographically diverse examples to back up its assertions. PM discussed the guidelines with Duany—author, architect and founder of the Congress for New Urbanism.

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Popular Mechanics: Who is the book's intended audience?

Andres Duany: This book is for regular folks—elected officials and citizens at all levels of planning. These are technical issues, but they're not very difficult. To decide the location of a bike trail, or whether to allow solar collectors on roofs, citizens have to become utterly empowered, to realize: I am local government. To a great extent, everyone has experienced good and bad urbanism. The topic is intrinsically interesting. Everyone connects to urbanism, and when I lecture on the topic, I'm glad I can elicit examples that are already in people's minds.

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PM: Now it's called "smart growth."

AD: Suburban Nation explained the situation but it didn't really tell you what to do. The Smart Growth Manual takes the form of a master plan, stating: This is what you do. This manual feels complete because we marched through the documents of all 116 organizations listed in the text [United States Green Building Council, National Trust for Historic Preservation, etc.], collected what they thought was "smart growth," and put it together. The manual's tone of urgency doesn't say, "Let's study this." It says, "This is what we must do." It's something akin to a wartime footing.

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PM: Could you name an example of a single most important idea of what must be done?

AD: If I could control how every building meets the sidewalk, and what goes inside that area, I could achieve about 80 percent of what makes urbanism walkable. Once you have walkability, everything flows from it, organically. A walkable neighborhood is a fundamental part of the human habitat.

PM: Are people getting that message?

AD: People who have been elected make planning decisions, but just because they're elected, they don't necessarily know how. If that's the case, they should demand copies of this manual, hand them out, and require that local citizens read it. Each page takes less than a minute to read. You can hand it out in a classroom and say, "Look, kid, this thing is only going to take 180 minutes to read."

We [Duany and his co-authors] were surprised to see Suburban Nation ending up in high schools—it was a little subpar for a college text. We were thinking the Smart Growth Manualmight work well as a video for elementary school children.

PM: Surely you could do better than The Story of Stuff.

AD: It's so reductive! Kids are being taught "nature, nature, nature," so much that ultimately humans are the problem, and urban environments are the problem. Eventually you begin calculating the ecological footprint of every American child, and it's a disaster. If all the tools are nature, and humans can do nothing, you could see the destruction of urbanism—and then you end up with more suburbs.