Planning at the Edge: Planning Capacity, Growth Pressure, and Growth Management at the Urban Fringe.

Abstract

In many states, the task of managing the pace and nature of future growth is left to local governments. That they are adequately carrying out the planning process is largely taken on faith. In this dissertation I test the hypotheses that existing land use conformance with master plan goals and future land use maps decreases with growth pressure and increases with planning capacity. I combine GIS analysis, plan and zoning document analysis, and qualitative interview analysis to investigate these hypotheses. Local governments use the long range master planning process to project and manage a future vision for the community. In theory, the process works as follows. First, the planning commission holds a visioning session to gain community consensus on plan goals. Commission members and planners incorporate those goals into the master plan and set forth objectives and implementation steps. Local government officials implement the plan by codifying its recommendations in the zoning ordinance, and enforcing ordinances uniformly. At each of these four steps, however, the process can break down, and the spirit of the community’s vision can fail to be translated into reality. I call these the four potential disconnects. I find that a lack of planning capacity, meaning the resources available to the community with which to plan, can indeed negatively influence conformance with master plan goals; in other words, lack of planning capacity makes it more likely that the community experiences disconnects in the planning process. Some combination of money, community involvement, and staff and official expertise is necessary to first create a high quality plan, then implement it and enforce ordinances consistently. Higher growth pressure is associated with lower conformance between existing land use and future land use maps, but a large part of this difference can be explained by vacant land use succession patterns in urbanizing areas. An awareness of causes and circumstances involved in the breakdown of the planning process allows the direction of resources in a targeted manner to improve conformance between plans and built outcomes.