Urban containment as smart growth

This chapter provides a review of urban containment as a principle of smart growth in the United States. It opens by introducing the concept and explaining its origins and purpose. The history of containment shows that it first emerged as a pragmatic response to urban sprawl, a pattern of development that poses a number of objective problems, which smart growth seeks to address. It took hold as a matter of public policy in the 1970s and has since evolved into a wider landscape of policies, ranging from large-scale frameworks in the form of urban growth boundaries and other regional policies to small-scale frameworks in the form of local design standards. As it unfolds, the chapter argues that a "smart growth 2.0" should adopt a market-oriented perspective on containment aimed at channeling the positive externalities of urbanization and overcoming its negative externalities.