Smart Growth and the Scalar Politics of Land Management in the Greater Boston Region, Usa

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed a significant transformation in strategies of urban environmental governance as authority has shifted from statist command-and-control systems to more horizontal, networked forms of governance-beyond-the-state. In the USA the changing nature of state authority over urban-regional planning processes has been particularly dramatic in metropolitan regions promoting 'smart-growth' agendas. Smart-growth strategies address regional planning and land-development concerns through market-based incentive programs aimed at increasing development densities and coordinating other land-management priorities. This paper explores the scalar politics through which smart-growth policies in the Greater Boston region of Massachusetts (USA) are being constructed and contested. In this region the state of Massachusetts has used incentive programs, new forms of regulation, and public-private coalitions to implement a smart-growth agenda that seeks to ameliorate the region's housing crisis and sustain its pool of knowledge-economy workers, but these programs also challenge the traditional authority of local communities in governing land-use decisions. Crucial to this assertion of land-management authority at the state scale has been the legacies of past forms of authority and land management, the ability of the state to exploit the positionalities of key actors associated with the smart-growth agenda, and the role of crises (in housing, congestion) in making increased state control more palatable.

Scale and the construction of environmental imaginaries in local news

“…At the urban scale, geographers have examined how differing imaginaries of the city shape people's willingness to invest in or rebuild neighbourhoods (Kitson and McHugh, 2014;McCauley and Murphy;, eat or shop in those areas (Harris, 2010), or even move bodily through them (Pierce and Lawhon, 2015). Recent scholarship has also emphasized how individual or collective self-perception is intertwined with the (re)production of urban place imaginaries: for example, when tourists select destinations by matching themselves against the places they might visit (Akerlund and Sandberg, 2014) or permanently resettle (Rios and Watkins, 2015).…”

Measuring Smart Land Use in Urban–Rural Regions of China: A Case Study of Pukou, Nanjing City

“…The study of smart urban growth is mainly focused on realization of objectives and the effects of policies (Behan, Maoh, and Kanaroglou 2008;Daniels and Lapping 2005;Krueger and Gibbs 2008;Leigh and Hoelzel 2012;Miller and Hoel 2002;Wlodarczak 2012). The concept of urban smart growth has been widely introduced to the study of land use management, which includes land use planning, land saving, and optimal allocation (Cao and Chatman, 2016;Gabriel, Faria, and Moglen 2006;Greenberg et al 2001;Jun 2008;Li et al 2005;McCauley and Murphy 2013;Ren et al 2008;Shen and Zhang 2007). Some scholars have concentrated on the measurement of smart land use (Galster et al 2001;Lopez and Hynes 2003) and have also discussed the evaluation indicators and measurement methods.…”

Landfarming: A contested space for the management of waste from oil and gas extraction

“…Within this literature, authors have drawn attention to the politics of environmental conditions and, in particular, the construction and contestation of appropriate scales of environmental governance or authority (e.g. Cohen, 2012;McCarthy, 2005;McCauley and Murphy, 2013). A key contribution is the inseparability of nature and society in processes of scale construction (Huber and Emel, 2009;McCarthy, 2005;Swyngedouw, 2004), and thus the consideration of non-human actants and biophysical processes (Neumann, 2009). Pertinent to our analysis is how the socio-environmental effects of oil and gas exploration and extraction, and the materiality of the waste produced, come to matter in the politics of scale (Boyle, 2002;Huber and Emel, 2009).…”