Why New Urbanism and Smart Growth

Date last updated 10:16 am Mar 6th, 2007

Denise Kowal supports Smart Growth and New Urbanist principles and has studied both, achieving 19 A.I.A. LU credits from the Congress of New Urbanism, and Smart Growth through study of the SmartCode and other urban development efforts. Denise is a member of the Congress of New Urbanism and has been endorsed by Andres Duany for her involvement and knowledge of its principles.

Smart Growth and New Urbanist principles both support our goals of being a city centered on transit and pedestrian-oriented amenities, a variety of housing, commercial and retail units, and preservation of our open land and environmental goals. They are however not the same thing; Smart Growth is a policy-driven movement while New Urbanism is a design-oriented movement.

New Urbanism started in the 1980’s with the groundbreaking designs in the new traditional town of Seaside, Florida. Today over 900 New Urbanist communities across the continent have developed with varying degrees of success. Many of these projects have been difficult to maintain without adequate New Urbanist expertise and politically fraught implementation processes that undermine the community vision. Sarasota has had this problem with the incumbent who lacks the overall understanding of the interconnections of the various pieces of our plan needed to make the proper decisions for our city. Denise Kowal has the education and experience in this field. SmartCode was created to keep standards true to New Urbanist principles, making it easier for stakeholders to create the compact, walkable communities they intend.

The most important New Urbanist principle is the rural-to-urban transect for the built environment. In Transect planning, the intent is to find the qualities of the local environment and identify and rectify the inappropriate intermixing of rural and urban character. Creating balance between rural and urban elements creates appropriate places by countermanding sprawl conditions.

As Duany stated, “the current city commission is certainly not experts because they were not there. When (the commission) decides to not follow or change the master plan you (the commission) have to become experts… or say I am not qualified to make a decision.” Without being knowledgeable of the cause and effect, the current incumbent has voted out key components of the Master Plan. Denise Kowal fought on behalf of the Master Plan and our city to save the vision of our Master Plan for the past several years. She would like to continue that fight as the District 2 City Commissioner.

Please vote and please vote for Denise Kowal.