Message from the Executive Director

Thank you for taking time to examine the website of the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education. Although the Center is still quite young, it has made great strides toward its mission of becoming a national and international leader in research and education on the topic of smart growth. Since our founding, Center staff have made important contributions to scholarship on a variety of topics, played significant roles on local planning and development initiatives, and helped educate a new generation of leaders on smart growth related topics.

Research remains the primary area of emphasis and productivity. In 2004, Center staff published 12 papers in scholarly journals and had 16 published in 2005 or accepted for future publication. Twenty papers are in review. Also in 2004, Center staff published four chapters in books (eight forthcoming) and are editing or co-editing eight complete books. Further, staff in 2004 and 2005 published more than 19 working papers, professional reports, non-refereed articles, and other publications. This impressive body of work has been supported by more than $1.5 million in grants and contracts from a diverse list of organizations that includes the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development, Urban Land Institute, Maryland-National Capital Building Industry Association, Homebuilders Association of Maryland, National Endowment for the Arts, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and others.

Interesting and important projects are underway in each of the Center's program areas. In the area of Transportation and Public Health, for example, projects funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation involve quantification of concepts in urban design, identifying the environmental determinants of physical activity in adolescents and adults, and developing a guide for traffic calming based on international case studies. One or more members of the Center staff have been on successful teams in three of four highly competitive rounds of funding by the Active Living Research program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In addition, projects funded by the Maryland Department of Transportation and the New Jersey Department of Transportation are advancing techniques in pedestrian modeling and context sensitive highway design, respectively. Finally, the Center recently joined researchers at Stanford University, San Diego State University and the University of British Columbia on the Neighborhood Quality of Life Study project funded by the National Institutes of Health. This project involves an examination of the relationship between physical activity and urban form in selected sites in Seattle and Baltimore.

Several projects also continue in the area of Land Use and Environment. With funding from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Brookings Institution, Center staff continue to develop and apply new ways of measuring urban form. This work, and previous work by Reid Ewing on Measures of Sprawl, has made the Center a national leader in efforts to quantify urban form. Closely related are the Land Market Monitoring and Maryland Indicators projects, also funded in part by the Lincoln Institute, the National Association of Realtors, and the National Association of Home Builders. These projects are establishing seminal approaches to understanding urban development patterns and the efficacy of land use policy. A Guidebook on how to conduct a residential capacity analysis was recently co-published by the Center, the Lincoln Institute, and the Maryland Department of Planning. Center staff have also made important new contributions to the debate over urban growth boundaries and the political economy of urban growth management.

Center projects in the area of Housing and Community Development will soon produce important contributions to knowledge on regulatory barriers to affordable housing. Two projects funded by HUD, Fannie Mae, and the Lincoln Institute examine the effects of zoning ordinances and subdivision regulations on housing affordability, respectively. The former uses GIS data from six metropolitan areas and the latter involves collecting subdivision regulations from several hundred local governments. Collaborators on these projects include the American Planning Association and ECONorthwest, a Eugene, Oregon, consulting firm. A project on the efficacy of adequate public facilities ordinances, funded by the Homebuilders Association of Maryland and the Maryland National Capital Building Industry Association, is certain to make influential contributions to the sparse literature on these land management instruments.

International Development work at the Center continues to be dominated by the China Land Policy Program led by Chengri Ding and funded by the Lincoln Institute. Projects include technical assistance to the Beijing Planning Commission, a farmland preservation demonstration project co-sponsored by China's Ministry of Land Resources, and seminars and workshops on property taxation co-sponsored by China's State Administration of Taxation. Additional contributions to the Center's international program include an international conference on the Role of States and Nation-states in Smart Growth Planning,co-sponsored by the Dutch foundation, Habiforum, as well as ongoing work with the MILU [Multifunctional and Intensive Land Use] Network of European towns and cities. Finally, the Center hosted two international visiting scholars: Yajun Wang from the Beijing Planning Commission and Mirjam Bult-Sperling, from the Twente University in the Netherlands.

The education mission was well served by another successful Smart Growth Leadership Program, several workshops on Land Market Monitoring, and various training sessions for young scholars and government officials in the People's Republic of China. Now, after launching the Governors Institute on Community Design with the Smart Growth Leadership Institute, the Center' education reach will extend to governors and their top state government staff around the country.

Finally, Center staff continue to make significant contributions in Outreach and Service. Center staff and graduate assistants played a critical role in the Reality Check exercise recently conducted in Washington, D.C. This exercise, which involved 300 community leaders from across the Washington metropolitan area, gave the Center a unique opportunity to demonstrate its technical capacities before a large and influential audience. Center staff also conducted studies and served on panels that evaluated the Intercounty Connector, the highly controversial new east-west highway planned across Montgomery County. In addition, Center staff regularly serve as referees for a variety of journals and serve as an associate editor on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Planning Association. Finally, Center staff have given countless professional talks and presentations all over the world.

All in all, the Center has had its most productive year yet. Although the staff is small, it has with the assistance of students in the Schools of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Public Policy, Agriculture and Natural Resources, and Engineering -- made important scholarly contributions to issues in smart growth in Maryland, the United States, and around the world. As the size of the staff and the depth of the staff's experience continues to grow, so will the Center's reputation as a leader in research and education on issues related to smart growth.

Gerrit Knaap Professor and Executive Director

(To read a Smart Growth-related interview with Gerrit Knaap that appeared in the Lincoln Institute's Land Lines newsletter please click click here).