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CIAO DATE: 06/06
The Shape of Metropolitan Growth: How Policy Tools Affect Growth Patterns in Seattle and Orlando
William Fulton, Linda E. Hollis, Chris Williamson, and Erik Kancler
April 2006
Executive Summary
Land use, infrastructure, and open space policy play an important role in shaping metropolitan growth, and whether or not they are coordinated on the policy level, they do interact with each other in shaping those patterns.
However, the exact interplay of these policies is not well understood.
This paper uses two metropolitan areas—Orlando and Seattle—with differing growth management regimes to explore the effects of conscious growth policy on metropolitan form.
In Orlando, growth management is realized largely through open space protection guided by state law and environmental concerns. Though Florida also has a state growth management law, it is far more concerned with providing concurrent infrastructure with new development than guiding metropolitan form.
The Seattle experience differs in that the state growth management law and its attendant urban growth boundary were the major policy influence on metropolitan growth. However, additional efforts in agricultural protection and the use of transferable development rights also played a key role.
Overall the paper finds that:
- Urban growth boundaries can help to redirect urban growth, but in and of themselves they cannot encourage a fundamentally different urban form.
- Open space protection efforts can divert growth away from important natural areas, but as a more defensive, or reactive, approach, they themselves they cannot shape a coherent metropolitan form.
- Neither solution, by itself, solves the problem of the development battleground on the metropolitan fringe, often the most politically divisive growth area in any region.
- Unless they are coordinated, these different types of policies often work at cross-purposes, boosting the costs of land preservation and/or open space protection.
Though these two metropolitan areas are hardly emblematic of all of the nation's cities, they do offer insights into the enactment and implementation of conscious strategies to guide metropolitan development. Perhaps the overwhelming lesson is that, in order to best adapt to market forces, especially on the battleground of the metropolitan fringe, growth policies should be conceived and implemented in a holistic fashion.
