Growth Control: Some Questions for Urban Decisionmakers.

This report is intended to provide urban decisionmakers--mayors, city managers, planning directors, key staff and line officials, city councilmen--and citizen groups with a guide to some of the issues that surround the effort to bring urban growth under control. The report attempts to be neutral in regard to whether urban growth should be controlled, suggesting instead that communities should ask themselves why they want to control growth (if they do) as a first question in examining how to control. Two analysis-based views on urban change must not, however, be concealed. First, it is very easy to confuse causes and effects in urban growth. Second, it may be easy to control growth within a limited political jurisdiction, but if the locally determined objective is to control growth over a broad area, it is very easy for rigorous control of the parts to allow continued chaos of the whole. Following an introduction, the second section of this report takes up various possible objectives of urban growth control and their implications; Section Three discusses the possibilities of different kinds of control; Section Four goes into some detail on issues raised by "side effects" of attempting to control urban growth. Then Section Five addresses the question of how urban growth might be controlled. (Author/JM)