Cities: 'smart growth'

Conn College speaker says 'smart growth' key to better cities

03/05/2011 - With reinvestment and redesign around "smart growth" principles, cities large and small could become epicenters of a new "green" economy. Those principles would include such concepts as walkability, easy access to public transportation and mixed-use neighborhoods that might include solar panel and wind turbine plants.

So said Anthony Flint, keynote speaker at the Smart Growth conference at Connecticut College Friday and today.

"Cities are the greenest form of human settlement we can aspire to," that can help "chip away at climate change," with frugal land and energy use and reduced dependence on cars, said Flint, author as well as a fellow and public affairs director at the Lincoln Land Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Mass. "We don't need to build any more single-family homes in subdivisions. The smartest developers have started turning to multifamily and urban infill, and it's also increasingly what people want - to have shorter commutes and be near transit." {continued}