Explore Smart Growth 101 
If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up someplace else.
How Smart Growth Happens
A number of factors, or components, of decision-making and investment are brought together to make the goals of smart growth possible.
It can be easy to dismiss the importance of design – the design of our buildings, streets, public plazas, and open spaces – as unimportant to the quality of our communities. But quality design is integral to the creation of healthy, sustainable, pleasant places to live.
It is not purely an aesthetic luxury – good design actually encourages different types of behavior.
For example, a person is considerably more likely to walk along a well-lit, tree-lined street with ample sidewalks and shop windows to look into than he/she is to walk down a dark alleyway. And from an aesthetic standpoint, design creates attractive communities that people actively want to live in, as opposed to fleeing to a new development on the sprawling outskirts of town.
Successful community design often involves:
Giving the development an identifiable center and edges
Offering a mix of land uses and building types
Building at a scale that encourages walking to destinations
Featuring a network of walkable streets (sidewalks, trees, shade)
Allowing for special sites and buildings for civic purposes (library, town hall, post office)
Tools available for communities to reach consensus on the design principles include visual preference surveys, computerized photo-graphics programs, and commercially-available GIS mapping products that can help communities take the long view on how and where to manage growth.
