Making ‘Smart’ Use of a Sewer in Worcester, Massachusetts: A Cautionary Note on Smart Growth as an Economic Development Policy

Abstract

This paper provides a conceptual critique of ‘smart growth’, an increasingly popular urban redevelopment strategy, as an economic development policy. It seeks to do this in two ways. First, an argument is made for how the smart growth movement is linked to more broad discourses of economic development. Second, through an urban political ecology analysis, it is suggested that smart growth, through the lens of the environment, reveals an uneven distribution of benefits among people affected by smart growth developments. This is because smart growth itself is embedded in a particular historical construction of environment. To explore these issues the author focuses on the Blackstone River and Canal, the site of a new smart growth development, in New England's third largest city of Worcester, Massachusetts. The Blackstone case presented here is exemplary in that it so clearly reflects the evolution of regional capitalist development, including the current one. Moreover, these periods, once past, are not relegated to the dustbins of history; rather they inform the next round of development. The case study below will thus reveal how these histories have, circuitously, played a role in the rationalization for the redevelopment of the canal as a smart growth project as well as elucidate the implications for the winners and losers of smart growth. The paper concludes with some thoughts on how we might, in practical terms, unlock the progressive potential of this development paradigm.

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