Synopses & Reviews
This book investigates urban growth management in the USA as a contested form of state territoriality. Synthesizing, interpreting, and contributing to literature on the history, theory and practices of urban growth management, the analysis offers critically theorized case studies of four ‘city-regions located in four different growth management states.”
Review
“This exceptionally well- written book represents an analysis of the recent history of growth management in the United States, considered as an important dimension of contested state territoriality. The argument presented here is wrapped up into wider debates about state re-scaling and the neo-liberalization of space, viz. the deregulation and flexibilization of urban-region planning and policy. At the same time, the book is a critique of a tendency to over-represent the politics of space in the American city-region as a neo-liberal politics. With an original integration of planning literatures with political geographical theory, the author unravels a variety of rationalities found in different planning regimes across the USA, drawing upon examples from Seattle-Tacoma, Baltimore, Portland, and Madison. Dierwechters volume will be enriching for scholars at all levels in urban and political geography, city and regional planning, urban sociology as well as political science.”--Andrew E.G. Jonas, Professor of Human Geography, Hull University, England
Synopsis
This book introduces, synthesizes, and evaluates spatial planning for growth management in the contemporary USA. It discusses the neglected relationship between the actual environmental results of various state growth management systems and the geographically diverse politics of discontent with these various systems.
About the Author
Yonn Dierwechter is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma.
Table of Contents
Introduction * Pro-growth, anti-growth, smart growth: history for a ‘usable future * The territorialities of the smart-growth paradigm: a theoretical framework * Spatial promises: smart goals for urban growth management * Spatial practices: tools, techniques and the geo-politics of urban growth management * Metropolitan Portland: excavating the new territorialities of ‘success * Seattle-Tacoma: re-scaling the spaces of fragmented places * Greater Baltimore: hope through smart growth and the spaces of retreat * Madison-Dane County: regionalizing the progressive tradition * Conclusions: after the ‘next step