Managing and mitigating the impacts of urban sprawl remain challenges for spatial planning in the 21st century. Despite a slowdown in global population growth and urbanization, rates of land consumption remain high, particularly in developing and emerging economies (Angel/Parent/Civco et al. 2011; Seto/Güneralp/Hutyra 2012; Zhou/Varquez/Kanda 2019; Güneralp/Reba/Hales et al. 2020). However, even in more developed regions, where cities and metropolitan areas have experienced population stagnation and even shrinkage in some cases, the conversion of land from non-urban to urban uses continues apace (Salvati/Morelli 2014; Wolff/Haase/Haase 2018; Taubenböck/Gerten/Rusche et al. 2019; Schiavina/Melchiorri/Corbane et al. 2022).

Although urbanization is a global phenomenon, its causes are diverse, manifold and context specific. More traditional explanations such as population growth, economic development, declining transportation costs, and technological change are augmented by changing housing consumption patterns, lifestyle preferences, and a favourable public policy environment that encourages and even subsidizes development (Colsaet/Laurans/Levrel 2018; Nuissl/Siedentop 2021). Recent developments, such as the financialization of the housing market, concerns over housing affordability (Wetzstein 2017), urban gentrification, and the suburbanization of low- and medium-income households (Hochstenbach/Musterd 2018) have increased the complexity of the urbanization process. The response to COVID-19 has only exacerbated suburbanization and development pressure (Gallent/Madeddu 2021; Jabareen/Eizenberg 2021). Much of this development has resulted in low density, automobile-dependent suburban sprawl that has produced a range of undesirable social, environmental, and economic externalities.

Over recent decades, state and local governments across the globe have increasingly employed and implemented planning, policy, and regulatory techniques to influence the allocation and distribution of new urban development across a designated area, mitigate the negative impacts of urban growth, and achieve more desirable (‘sustainable’) urban form. In both planning literature and practice, these efforts have been referred to collectively by a number of labels, including ‘urban growth management’, ‘smart growth’, ‘urban containment’, ‘compact city policies’ or ‘sustainable land use’. In this paper, we prefer the term ‘urban growth management’ (UGM), which we define – following Nelson, Pendall, Dawkins et al. (2002: 2) – as “the deliberate and integrated use of the planning, regulatory, and fiscal authority of state and local governments to influence the pattern of growth and development […]”. Simply put, urban growth management aims at “channeling the positive externalities of urbanization and overcoming its inevitable negative externalities” (Carruthers/Wei/Wostenholme 2022: 60).

However, despite this straightforward definition, urban growth management programs differ in terms of their normative agenda, institutional context, and policy design (Addison/Zhang/Coomes 2013). In planning practice, a range of principles and goals – ‘compactness’, ‘sustainable development,’ ‘polycentricity’ among others – are used to justify urban growth management, depending on the socio-economic framework, cultural values, historical experiences, planning system, governance arrangements, and institutional settings (Fertner/Jørgensen/Sick Nielsen et al. 2016; OECD 2017).

Academic interest in urban growth management experiences has considerably expanded during the last decades, with a notable peak in the 1990s/2000s, followed by a subsequent waning of interest thereafter. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that the vast majority of work has been historically focused on the North American experience (Weitz 1999; Bengston/Fletcher/Nelson 2004; Landis 2006; Boyle/Mohamed 2007; Addison/Zhang/Coomes 2013; Landis 2021; Ewing/Lyons/Siddiq et al. 2022; see also Knaap/Haccou 2007 with a critical note on the ‘insular’ nature of US planning debates and a plea for trans-Atlantic comparison). More recently, however, the issue has gained renewed interest in Europe, where current practices of urban growth management follow a longer tradition of regional planning (see for example Kühn 2003; Siedentop/Fina/Krehl 2016; Hersperger/Grădinaru/Siedentop 2020; Xie/Kang/Behnisch et al. 2020; Eichhorn/Pehlke 2022) but have also become the focus of recent efforts by the European Union (European Commission 2021). Moreover, some Asian countries have substantial experience with growth management programs in metropolitan regions (see for example Yeung 1986; Nakai 1988; Cho 2002; Frenkel/Orenstein 2012; Han 2019).

What can decades of studies tell us about the current state of the practice of growth management, and how effective have urban growth management policies been in achieving the goals they set out to achieve? In addressing these questions, the scholarly literature on growth management has had to contend with several ambiguously defined issues, and consequently there is substantial disagreement among scholars and policymakers over the effectiveness and outcomes of growth management policymaking. First, there is some disagreement about the purpose and role of growth management, and therefore what constitutes a growth management policy. As such, operationalizing growth management as part of an empirical evaluation or impact study is problematic. Second, in terms of evaluating effectiveness, critics of growth management from both the political left and the right abound. They point out the limited effectiveness of urban growth management policies as well as the unintended effects of restrictive land use regulations on housing affordability or economic growth. Consequently, debates about growth management are often politically charged and potentially biased. Third, there is a widespread lack of systematic evaluation studies that have produced generalizable results, and the empirical findings of these studies are often contradictory or ambiguous. This can be attributed to different theoretical and methodological approaches, varying scales of observation (local, regional, state) and heterogeneous data use. Carruthers’ (2002: 391) review of the US literature notes that “evaluation has not kept pace with implementation” (see Diller/Eichhorn/Pehlke 2021 with a similar note for Germany), a claim that remains valid 20 years later. The evidence for assessing the effects of growth management remains rather weak.

In this paper, we systematically review the extensive literature on growth management to better understand a) the current state of the practice of urban growth management, and b) the determinants of successful urban growth management implementation. While the review studies available so far have mostly focused on the North American debate, this paper incorporates European and – to a certain degree – Asian and Oceanic experiences in growth management.

Our paper is organized in four main sections. Following an explanation of the methodological approach in Section 2, Section 3 provides a brief outline of the history of urban growth management. Several development phases are distinguished and briefly described. Section 4 presents an overview of the objectives, governance approaches and instruments of urban growth management, while Section 5 reviews the state of knowledge on the intended and unintended impacts. Here, five generalized success factors are discussed. Section 6 concludes with a brief summary and outlook.

Our reference material includes 287 academic manuscripts (mainly peer-reviewed journal papers) which were identified through a systematic literature survey using the Clarivate ‘Web of Science’ database. Key terms were ‘urban growth management’, ‘urban containment’, and ‘smart growth’. We also screened the literature with policy-specific keywords such as ‘urban growth boundary’ and ‘greenbelt’ (or ‘green belt’, ‘greenway’ and ‘green corridor’). Articles published before 1980 were excluded.

We limit ourselves to the Global North and to countries where spatial policymaking is the result of a democratic process of negotiation at different political levels and where growth management is a long-established policy area. We argue here that spatial policies in states with authoritarian, non-democratic forms of government (e.g., China) are fundamentally not comparable to planning experiences in Western democracies. Our focus is therefore on North America, Europe and some Asian and Oceanic countries (South Korea, Japan, Israel, Australia). Furthermore, our key aim is to discuss the effectiveness and outcomes of urban growth management at the regional level. More narrowly conceived forms of local growth control (such as local zoning techniques) were not considered. The same applies to studies exclusively discussing the benefits of a specific urban form (e.g., compactness or polycentricity) without considering the use of policy instruments and their effectiveness.

An initial screening of the Clarivate database revealed approximately 600 entries. Based on the abstracts, titles and keywords, this was reduced to about 440 entries. A more detailed examination of each source was carried out to ensure its relevance. The abstracts of any sources listed under forestry, agronomy, fuels, soil science, water resources, health impacts, and GIS were cross-examined and deleted if found to lack relevance. Moreover, if the title or the keywords did not contain any of the above-mentioned search terms, the respective entries were deleted accordingly. This reduced the number of documents to 287 (see the online supplementary material), of which about 130 were evaluated in detail due to their particular relevance.

We note that we are well aware of the limitations and weaknesses of our method. A literature synthesis based on key words cannot identify all potentially relevant sources. This is especially true when considering language differences. In the European and Asian debates, many studies are available in languages other than English. While we did consider some German-language papers, we were unable to incorporate studies in other languages more broadly given the effort involved.

The emergence of modern urban and regional planning in the 19th and early 20th centuries can be understood as a response to economic, environmental, and social problems associated with the Industrial Revolution and its transformative power. Urban reformers, housing advocates, and local officials saw themselves challenged by the ‘urban problem’: rapid population growth and overcrowding in industrial cities, increased congestion and pollution, insufficient services and sanitary provision (Hall 2002), and a subsequent poor quality of life for residents, coupled with the loss of surrounding agricultural lands and environmentally sensitive areas. During the initial decades of the 20th century, early growth management efforts were often a realization that the solution to the urban problem required thinking and planning at a regional scale, as advocated by a number of urban reformers and pioneer thinkers including Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, Patrick Abercrombie, Daniel Burnham, and Robert Schmidt.

Regional scale planning has its origins in Germany, when municipalities in both the Ruhr and Berlin metropolitan areas began to voluntarily organize themselves in the early 20th century. In Great Britain, the first regional plan was introduced by Patrick Abercrombie after the First World War, in order to address the rapid development of the coal industry. Metropolitan planning associations emerged, including London (1889), Berlin (1912), the Ruhr region (1920), and Chicago (1934), often as municipal planning institutions with rather informal forms of supra-municipal cooperation and a narrow focus. Their responsibilities were frequently limited to the protection of open spaces or the development of a regional transport network (Blotevogel 2018: 794). In the US, several regional plan associations were established in a number of cities during the 1920s (particularly influential was the 1929 “Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs”). Early local or supra-local urban development plans – such as the Plan of Chicago (1909), the Verbandsgrünflächenplan (Regional Green Space Plan) for the Ruhr Area (1923), the Plan for Greater London (1944), and the Copenhagen Finger Plan (1948) – responded to localized problems of urban sprawl, were often sectorally focused, and were implemented without being formally embedded in national planning approaches and legal frameworks. This pioneering phase of urban growth management is characterized by a local ‘bottom-up’ and sectoral focus (i.e., recreation, transportation) initiatives.

It was not until the post-war period, characterized by economic growth, rising incomes, auto-dominated suburban sprawl, and the subsequent environmental impacts and concerns over quality of life in the 1960s and 1970s, that growth management policies became popularly accepted and widely institutionalized (Rome 2001). Nonetheless, van Meeteren’s (2022) historical analysis of the Randstad’s polycentricity between 1930 and 1960 emphasizes the existence of growth management policies prior to this time.

In general, the policy response to suburban sprawl and the implementation of urban growth management across the globe has not proceeded in a linear and unidirectional fashion but rather haphazardly, and has often been described in historical phases or waves (see DeGrove/Stroud 1987; Boyle/Mohamed 2007; Ingram/Carbonell/Hong et al. 2009; Chapin 2012 and Landis 2021 for the US; Blotevogel 2018 for Germany; or Hall 2002 for England). In fact, political setbacks and retrenchment are commonplace, and support for urban growth management tends to wax and wane depending on changes to the political economy. For example, there was a decline in interest in growth regulations following the Great Recession of 2008 (Anthony 2017). After serving as a leader in state growth management during the 1980s, the state of Florida gutted its growth management act in 2011. Other states experienced political backlash, a shift in policy priorities over time, or a reallocation of planning responsibilities among state, regional, and local governments (Friedmann/Bloch 1990; Porter 1999; Smas/Schmitt 2021). Globally, the institutional and instrumental performance of urban growth management was curtailed or reformed during the neoliberal-influenced 1990s and 2000s (see Tasan-Kok/Baeten 2012). Examples include the planning system in the Netherlands (Faludi/van der Valk 1994) and Spain (Cladera/Burns 2000), while attempts to institutionalize regional planning in the UK were withdrawn or severely restricted (see Glasson/Marshall 2007).

On the other hand, mitigating climate change and addressing traffic congestion provided new rationales for urban growth management. Today, the international landscape of urban growth management approaches is multi-faceted and growth management is institutionally and politically established in many countries. The diversity of institutional arrangements, governance systems, and state-regulatory frameworks is enormous – not only at country level but also at state and regional levels in federal and decentralized political systems (Gale 1992; Wilson/Paterson 2002; Boyle/Mohamed 2007; Eichhorn/Diller/Pehlke 2021; Schmidt/Li/Carruthers et al. 2021).

Figure 1 indicates important strategic plans and legislative acts that have not only influenced and framed the national practices of urban growth management to a great extent, but have also had an international impact. The figure illustrates the evolution of urban growth management through several historical phases: a pioneering phase through until the mid-20th century, an institutionalization phase in the mid-20th century, a strategic reorientation and governance innovation phase with ‘smart growth’ as a key narrative (see Landis 2021 for more detail), and finally a decline in the number of major policy initiatives in the 2000s, which could reflect changing governmental priorities. We note that this does not claim to be an exhaustive collection. In the next section, we will discuss the aims, governance arrangements, and instrumental design of urban growth management in more detail.

Figure 1 Evolution of urban growth management

APA = American Planning Association, UGB = urban growth boundary

---

As mentioned, the methods, policies, and goals of urban growth management are evolving, context specific, and diverse. Nevertheless, a commonly cited goal is a more contained, spatially compact, higher density urban pattern (Han/Graham/Tsenkova 2020; Carruthers/Wei/Wostenholme 2022). Moreover, a ‘compact’ urban form is associated with a range of desirable planning outcomes: protecting natural resources, efficient infrastructure provision, improved multi-modal transportation accessibility, increased housing choices, walkable neighbourhoods, and the redevelopment of urban cores and older urban neighbourhoods (Godschalk 2000; Pendall/Martin/Fulton 2002; Addison/Zhang/Coomes 2013; Ahlfeldt/Pietrostefani/Schumann et al. 2018). These goals often fall under a number of corresponding planning agendas: ‘transit-oriented-development’ (Ibraeva/Homem de Almeida Correia/Silva et al. 2020), ‘complete communities’ (Fox 2010; Metro Vancouver 2011), or ‘15-minute-neighbourhoods’ (Moreno/Allam/Chabaud et al. 2021). Implicit in the development of a high density, compact, and multi-nodal city is the coordination of land use and transportation decision making and the cost-efficient provision of basic infrastructures, both of which are also commonly cited core objectives of urban growth management (Burchell/Mukherji 2003; Carruthers/Ulfarsson 2003; Hortas-Rico/Solé-Ollé 2010).

In developing the compact and multi-nodal city, a successful urban growth management approach limits the spread of development into the suburban periphery, redirects growth to desired places, and promotes a more sustainable urban form. However, the use of policy instruments can vary widely depending on the normative approach, the national planning system, and regional or local planning cultures. The literature contains several surveys of urban growth management planning instruments that utilize different classification systems (Bengston/Fletcher/Nelson 2004; Greiving/Dappen/Schlegelmilch et al. 2012; Siedentop/Fina/Krehl 2016; Landis 2021; Ewing/Lyons/Siddiq et al. 2022).

Ewing, Lyons, Siddiq et al. (2022: 2) (see also Greiving/Dappen/Schlegelmilch et al. 2012; Siedentop/Fina/Krehl 2016) distinguish instruments according to whether they positively direct urban growth by spatially defining where development is desirable, such as the redevelopment of an area with existing infrastructure and services (‘inside game’, ‘positive planning’, ‘positive allocative’) or whether they work negatively, prohibiting or discouraging development in an undesirable location, such as an environmentally sensitive area (‘outside game, ‘negative planning’, ‘open space protecting’). Similarly, Pendall, Martin, and Fulton (2002) distinguish between policy tools that restrict urban development in certain areas and thus ‘push’ growth to a more desirable direction or location, and instruments that provide incentives for development in prioritized areas (‘pull’ effects). According to this approach, greenbelts and urban growth boundaries are instruments which affect the ‘push’ factors while urban service boundaries or brownfield redevelopment funds rely on ‘pull’ effects.

Other approaches tend to distinguish instruments according to specific regulatory aims and program types. For example, in addition to traditional zoning tools, Landis (2021) differentiates between policies and instruments that control either the tempo, the rate, or the density of urban development. Bengston, Fletcher, and Nelson (2004) identify an instrument-specific typology of urban growth management tools, including public acquisition of land, regulatory instruments, and fiscal incentives as the basic means to manage urban growth and protect open space.

A significant number of studies find that a well-designed and consistently implemented growth management approach is an efficient means of achieving more sustainable urban development outcomes. At the same time, many studies have found that poorly managed urban growth management policies could have negative implications for housing supply and economic development. One key conclusion is that the positive and negative effects of growth management agendas not only depend on the nature of policies but also on the institutional context of their implementation.

We have identified five key success factors from the now extensive literature. First, urban growth management cannot be accomplished with local approaches alone. It requires appropriate multi-level governance and state administration of planning competencies and tasks. Second, a regional growth strategy requires intersectoral coordination, as spatial planning alone cannot manage potential conflicts with other policy areas such as housing, economic development, and agriculture. Of particular importance is the close collaboration of transit and land use planning. Third, effective growth management requires a regionally adapted mix of policy instruments and practice to improve implementation, increase public acceptance, and reduce unintended effects. Fourth, the political and social acceptance of growth management depends on whether positive development goals, such as the provision of housing to meet demand, can be linked to land and resource conservation goals. In growing metropolitan regions, urban growth management cannot succeed if interpreted as a mere ‘anti-growth’ agenda. Finally, urban growth management should be able to tell positive stories and narratives about the opportunities to develop more sustainable and liveable spatial patterns.

What does the future hold for urban growth management? On the one hand, growth management assumes growth. What is the role of growth management in an era of shrinking cities and declining regions? There are ongoing debates about the role and purpose of spatial planning in the ‘post-growth’ or ‘degrowth’ era (Zovanyi 2004; Næss/Saglie/Richardson 2020). Certainly, there are many examples of declining rust belt cities that continue to sprawl, but it remains unclear what post-growth actually means for regional policy and planning in highly dynamic metropolitan areas. On the other hand, urban growth management has proven itself to be a dynamic concept that has evolved from its humble origins and appropriated new goals, methods, and directions (while jettisoning little of its original mission).

With an escalating climate and resource crisis, housing affordability concerns, ongoing congestion problems, and increasing social inequality and segregation, new rationales for, and challenges to, growth management’s ambitions have emerged. While the housing affordability crisis has challenged some of the basic tenants of urban growth management (i.e., restricting development) and created new political coalitions, climate change and adaptation may result in a new generation of urban growth management concepts in which climate protection (Ewing/Bartholomew/Winkelman et al. 2007; Han/Daniels/Kim 2022) is coordinated with climate adaptation (Gill/Handley/Ennos et al. 2007). Similarly, the increasing urban-rural inequality in many parts of the world suggests that urban growth management, with its focus on regional scale interventions and spatial articulation, may have a role to play in addressing regional inequality and the ‘left-behind places’ (Rodríguez-Pose 2018), ‘peripheralized regions’ (Weck/Beißwenger 2014), and ‘geographies of discontent’ (Dijkstra/Poelman/Rodríguez-Pose 2018) in our metropolitan regions. As new forms of ‘mega-urban’ regions emerge that transcend political and administrative boundaries, a new generation of urban growth management concepts will need to be conceived at more inter-regional and national scales, particularly in the governance of inter-regional transport infrastructure planning (Innes/Booher/Di Vittorio 2011; Schafran 2014). We conclude with a quote from Edward Soja (2015: 379) that the “necessity for effective regional governance and planning” has never been so great. The challenge of increasingly globalized urbanization and complex ‘wicked problems’ calls for a new generation of urban growth management programs based on a pragmatic, adaptive, and flexible regionalism.