In the 1980s and 1990s, American communities began to reconsider the low-density growth patterns that reshaped urban areas in the post-World War II period. Many activists, architects and urban planners espoused a new approach known as Smart Growth. Smart Growth rested on two essential pillars: preserving rural landscapes near cities and increasing density in urban and suburban areas that had already been developed. In Smarter Growth, John Spiers examines the tensions surrounding development and preservation in the Washington DC suburbs from the 1970s to the early 2000s. His well-researched study is valuable for two main reasons. First, Spiers focuses on developments in the counties surrounding America's capital, not on federal environmental policy or legislation. After two decades of ground-breaking federal policy-making that reshaped environmental law and regulation, the locus of environmental innovation shifted to the local and state level in the 1990s. Spiers profitably directs his attention to where the action was.
Second, Spiers does an excellent job of highlighting the essential role of state government in shaping events on the local level. The political configuration of the Washington DC area provides a natural policy laboratory of sorts; the state of Virginia has long been a bastion of private property rights, while neighbouring Maryland has established a reputation as an environmental leader. The contrasting environmental sensibilities of the two states led to strikingly different outcomes in the area of farm preservation. In successive chapters, Spiers explores rural preservation efforts in Montgomery County, Maryland and Loudoun County, Virginia. Montgomery County was a post-war boomtown, but growth in Loudoun did not intensify until the 1980s. Environmental activists in both places wanted to preserve farmland and scenic rural landscapes and channel growth to areas with existing infrastructure.
The key to successful land preservation in Maryland was Montgomery County's Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) programme under which developers could purchase development rights from rural landowners. Rural landowners earned income from developers in exchange for agreeing not to build on portions of their property, and developers then deployed the rights they had purchased to build in denser areas of the county. Spiers dubbed the agricultural reserve that the TDR programme helped create ‘one of the greatest success stories of rural land preservation in metropolitan America during the late twentieth century’ (p. 123). While his sympathies are clearly with preservationists, Spiers offers a balanced assessment of the programme, noting that many county residents opposed the construction associated with the TDR programme and the transformation of the suburban and rural landscapes that they cherished. Activists in Loudoun County were keenly aware of preservation efforts in Maryland and sought to use many of the same tools to protect farms that were vulnerable to development. Intense dissension in the county stymied their progress, but opposition from state government was probably a more important limiting factor. The Virginia Supreme Court nullified the county's TDR programme, and the state offered only meagre support for land preservation efforts. The example of Montgomery and Loudoun highlights the enduring importance of federalism. Despite substantial enthusiasm for land preservation in both counties, political outcomes diverged in large part because of different attitudes in their respective state capitals.
Spiers also draws skilful distinctions between attitudes regarding growth within states. Residents in affluent and predominantly white Montgomery County could afford to oppose growth because they enjoyed access to abundant shopping, dining and entertainment options. Their counterparts to the south in Prince Georges County, Maryland, a mecca of African-American suburban life in the Washington area, felt much differently. Developers had long ignored the county, preferring to build shopping malls and restaurants in upscale Montgomery. When developers proposed a substantial commercial complex in the National Harbor area, most county residents supported the plan. Environmental activists struggled to gain traction against the plan because it enjoyed broad support among those who resented having to travel outside their neighbourhoods and towns to enjoy a decent meal or attend a cultural event. Locals also backed the development because it promised to provide additional tax revenues in a county that had imposed a cap on residential property taxes. Spiers is careful not to resort to stereotypes in discussing developments in Prince Georges; all whites, he notes, did not oppose National Harbor, and many African Americans sought to impose limits on the type and scale of building at the development.
Smarter Growth will not appeal to readers with an aversion to the details of policy-making. As is inevitable in a book of case-studies, some are richer and make for more interesting reading than others. In addition, Spiers’ tendency to see the roots of Smart Growth in environmental conflicts that took place decades before compact development and farmland preservation became galvanizing issues can be misleading. But, on balance, this is a valuable contribution to our understanding of American environmental policy. Careful regional studies like this one provide historians with the essential building blocks needed to construct larger narratives of environmental change.
