Applying Smart Growth Principles in Boulder, Colorado, and Canberra, Australia

摘要

The world is becoming increasingly urbanized: Small cities are developing rapidly, and large cities are growing larger and more populated. By 2050, the percentage of people living in cities is expected to reach 66%, a 22 percentage-point increase from today [United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2014]. Cities in the United States and Australia will particularly notice the growth, with current urbanization rates of 82% and 90%, respectively. Principles of smart growth can be used to address the issues of increased population. To assess city plans for growth over the next 30 years, we first define a metric to measure the success of smart growth. We use van Rijsber-gen's information retrieval effectiveness measure [1997] to combine pairs of quantitative measures of the growth principles that were significantly related. We then sum all of the resulting measures, under the assumption that each principle of smart growth is equally important. We apply this metric to the current growth plans of two cities: Boulder, Colorado, USA and Canberra, Australia. After evaluation of their current growth plans, we develop growth initiatives for both cities, and evaluate the expected outcomes of the new plans with our metric. For Boulder, these initiatives include rezoning land for mixed use, redeveloping residential areas, instituting vacancy taxes, increasing public transportation, and increasing community programming. For Canberra, the initiatives include rezoning new mixed use areas, partnering with private developers, increasing community engagement, and expanding bus routes. In both cities, we rate our proposed initiatives with our smart growth metric. Each city sees an increased score compared to the current score. Our metric is easy to use: All that is needed is easily-found census data. On the other hand, our model may be oversimplified due to equal weighting of each growth measure and the subjective nature of some of the measures. Our growth plan for each city also would prove inefficient in accommodating a 50% increase in population in each city.