People know there must be a better way to build communities, says Browner, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Browner spoke here Friday at a growth-management conference sponsored by the University of Virginia School of Law and the university's Center for Environmental Studies. Scholars, lawyers and environmentalists spent a day and a half debating how to achieve a more livable society. A conference on that topic is easier to find these days than rain in North Carolina. The Fredericksburg Area Homebuilders Association, for example, also held a smart growth seminar last week.
Smart growth is just one of the terms thrown around during such discussions.
So are livable communities and sustainable development. None of those terms have firm meanings, so value judgments and subjectivity often come into play. The anti-sprawl movement needs a better, more precise vocabulary if it expects to engage a general population that has a nagging sense of loss as farmland becomes subdivisions, traffic jams become commonplace and local taxes and fees rise so government can pay to extend water and sewer lines far into the country. Sprawl has moved from the periphery of the political debate to the center, U.Va. Nonetheless, he added, sprawl is not an easy phenomenon to understand, evaluate or cure.