THE GROWTH MANAGEMENT DELUSION

• NPG
• August 1, 1999
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 THE GROWTH MANAGEMENT DELUSION
An NPG Forum Paper
by Gabor Zovanyi
August 1999

The final quarter of the 20th century has been a period of unprecedented growth in the scale of the human enterprise and an era of attempting to cope with that growth by adopting growth management programs. During this time in the United States, local and state governments implemented thousands of growth management programs intended to manage the principal attributes of growth: amount, rate, location, and quality. Gabor Zovanyi’s 1998 book, Growth Management for a Sustainable Future, 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 this Forum, Dr. Zovanyi argues that growth management must abandon its support for the growth imperative, reject the false belief that management will make ongoing growth possible, and accept the need for basing future growth management on the imperative of ecological sustainability.

Introduction

During the 1960s and 1970s, an ideological shift occurred in America with respect to the value of further growth. The traditional association of population, economic, and urban growth with societal progress began giving way to a new and more skeptical view. This ideological shift did not come easily; conventional thinking had historically associated ongoing growth with a range of benefits, including stronger local economies, higher personal incomes, lower taxes, greater upward economic mobility for the poor, and a wider range of lifestyle choices for consumers. Despite these supposed benefits, increasing numbers of Americans were rejecting the view that growth was only beneficial during this period. Their personal experiences led them to associate growth with overcrowded schools, tax increases, rising crime rates, physical blight, traffic congestion, the loss of open space, the destruction of a way of life, and increasing air and water pollution.

This ideological shift in American attitudes toward growth began to affect popular perceptions regarding land development. Uses of land were increasingly being linked to a number of specific societal problems during this period. Growth, as manifested in the development of land, was being blamed for such diverse problems as the costly and destructive development pattern associated with urban sprawl, the loss of prime agricultural land,

What is missing from the literature on growth management is a definition of management activity directed at a deliberate attempt to stop growth.

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