Human growth after maturity becomes cancer. When a town continues to grow after maturity, its cancer is manifest in many ways - higher taxes, environmental degradation, spiteful controversy, and loss of a sense of community. But development is quite different from growth. After reaching physical maturity, humans continue to develop in many beneficial and interesting ways - learning new skills, discovering new interests and enterprises and gaining deeper wisdom. Similarly, a community can develop itself without expanding.
Growth is an increase in size, while development is an increase in quality and diversity.
Clearly, we must have a new kind of growth different from the sprawling, wasteful and polluting patterns we've seen in the past. Some would say, it has never been more urgent. Neither one may be a healthy or sustainable way to relate to the future. But as bureaucrats sensitive to the winds of short-term politics, it suits their purposes to choose a time comfortably far into the future when many of us will be gone. I know that most people don't have the time to delve into how our civic infrastructure operates and Lord knows, the government does not make it easy.