Managing Growth

Abstract

This study examines widespread efforts to manage the environmental impact of suburbanization in metropolitan America since 1970. Using the Washington, DC area as a site for analysis, I demonstrate how residents, public officials, and organized interests balanced suburban development and environmental protection. Featuring cases from the Virginia and Maryland suburbs, this project considers environmental conflicts resulting from housing, commercial, and highway projects as well as efforts to preserve rural land and farming from suburban encroachment. As metropolitan Washington decentralized, the environmental impact of suburbanization worsened, producing different approaches to managing development and protecting the environment. These responses reflected new social and spatial inequalities, as well as differences in political leadership and civic activism. While communities in Maryland benefited from more progressive public concern, local leadership and strong support from the state for growth management, their counterparts in Virginia struggled to overcome strong and pervasive protections for property rights. This project rewrites our understanding of suburbanization and environmental protection in two ways. First, it urges scholars to rethink a traditional emphasis on federal policies; even in the suburbs of the nation's capital, the active participation of the public at large, as well as officials at the local and state levels, was critical to the success or failure of environmental protection. The present study thus demonstrates how and why different approaches to growth management emerged across metropolitan areas. Second, this study differs from the existing social science literature by moving away from policy analysis to focus on the broader context of decision-making in planning suburban development. Drawing on correspondence, publicity materials, and public testimony from residents, environmental groups, local officials, business organizations, and federal agencies, this study offers a more complete picture of growth management, providing a historically informed and policy relevant argument about environmental protection in metropolitan America. Ultimately, it reveals that even with an unprecedented degree of expansion of state regulation and civic engagement, the legal and cultural regimes surrounding the use of property often continued to privilege private gain over environmental protection as localities competed for economic investment. In a few cases, however, we can see how residents and public officials pursued more holistic forms of growth management in metropolitan America, laying the groundwork for a model of more meaningful public participation to enhance environmental protection in the future.