Planning the green city? Growth management, environmentalism, and the politics of place in Boulder, Colorado, 1959--2001

Advocates of sustainable development and civic environmentalism argue that local land use policy may be the best means for reducing the huge global ecological footprint of American urban sprawl. Yet growth management programs with the capability to make significant reductions in sprawl are few, and of these, probably fewer still are implemented successfully.; Considerable research on growth management programs exists, but surprisingly little of it has considered these programs in their historical or cultural perspective. Most researchers have focused on verifying the claim that growth management inevitably leads to high housing costs, and thus unjust social exclusion. The exclusion hypothesis is a major reason why so few capable programs are adopted.; This research assumes that the significance that changing landscapes hold for diverse groups of people cannot be condensed into the measure of property values without losing its meaning. Local history and cultural interpretations of landscape, environment, and place are key considerations in understanding why people support growth management and whether they are able to implement it effectively.; This research tests these propositions in a case study of the place with one of the longest continuous histories of local growth management in the United States. It seeks to understand why people in Boulder have been motivated to adopt various forms of growth management, how they were able to implement it successfully in spite of the challenge from "growth machines," and what social consequences actually did result: It finds limited support for explanations of growth management as deliberately exclusionary behavior; environmentalism and sense of place have been more important motivations. It demonstrates that it is possible to construct a long-tenured growth management regime that permanently marginalizes traditional growth machines, even if it does not stop growth. It reveals regionally unique patterns of demographic change in Boulder, but not the ones predicted by literature or popular perception. Boulder's history of growth management fulfills many expectations of sustainable community advocates, though not all. It is a flawed but worthwhile model of what a turn to localized environmental policy making should look like.