GROWTH MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES FOR STOPPING GROWTH IN LOCAL COMMUNITIES
- Gabor Zovanyi
- June 1, 2000
- Forum Papers
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GROWTH MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES FOR STOPPING GROWTH IN LOCAL COMMUNITIES
An NPG Forum Paper
by Gabor Zovanyi
June 2000
Gabor Zovanyi’s 1998 book, Growth Management for a Sustainable Future: Ecological Sustainability as the New Growth Management Focus for the 21st Century, exposes the growth-accommodation bias of current growth management practices and makes a case for redirecting management efforts to a no-growth end based on ecological considerations. In his 1999 NPG Forum publication The Growth Management Delusion, Dr. Zovanyi argued that growth management must abandon its support for the growth imperative, reject the false belief that management will make environmentally-benign growth possible, and accept the need for basing future growth management activity on the imperative of ecological sustainability. In this Forum, Dr. Zovanyi presents arguments for debunking traditional pro-growth mythology, techniques for stopping growth in local communities, and suggestions for countering claims that local governmental actions to stop growth are illegal.
The last 5 decades of the 20th century represented a period of unprecedented growth in the scale of the human enterprise. Between 1950 and the year 2000 the human population increased from 2.5 billion to 6 billion. The addition of 3.5 billion people surpassed the total increase over all of human history prior to 1950. From a growth of some 42 million people a year in 1950, the annual increase jumped to around 80 million a year by 2000. In that same period the global economy expanded from some $5 trillion to over $30 billion. In the first half of the 1990s it expanded by more than $5 trillion, matching the growth from the beginning of civilization to 1950. The dramatic nature of the growth from 1950 to 2000 may also be illustrated by the striking growth of giant urban centers during that period. In the developing countries, the world went from having to contend with only 1 city of more than 5 million in 1950 to 46 cities topping 5 million by 2000.
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