Message from the Executive Director

Welcome to the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education. This is now our eighth year of operation and the sixth since I joined the Center. Our record of getting progress reports out on a regular schedule has been, well, irregular; but I like to think our productivity more than compensates.

As always, publication in scholarly publications remains among the Center’s strengths since our last progress report in 2005-2006. Since then, Center faculty and affiliates have published more than 71 articles in refereed journals, 14 chapters in books, 13 books or edited volumes, and countless reports, scholarly presentations, and public presentations. And, as before, Center staff continues to make contributions on a wide ranging number of topics that confront policy makers at the international, national, state, and local levels.

In addition, since the last progress report, the Center has added two sub-centers: the Environmental Finance Center and the Transportation Policy Research Group. The addition of these centers greatly expands the capacity of the Center to conduct research and provide technical assistance on environmental and transportation issues — two areas or critical importance, both now and in coming decades.

The highlights over the past two years are numerous, varied, and diverse. Chengri Ding remained active in China conducting research, speaking at major events, and hosting training sessions both in China and College Park. Reid Ewing followed his pioneering research on sprawl and obesity with even more path breaking and widely noticed research on sprawl and climate change, and has become an associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association.

John Frece and his colleagues with the Governor’s Institute on Community Design have consulted with the governors of eight states (Rhode Island, Virginia, Arizona, Delaware, Maryland, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Iowa), with 3 measurable impacts on state policy making. Kelly Clifton’s pedestrian audit instrument has become widely adopted across the country and she was promoted to associate professor based her strong record of scholarly contributions on the relationship between physical activity and urban form. I, meanwhile, continue to work closely with state agencies on topics that range from creating Maryland’s first State Development Plan, creating Maryland’s first statewide transportation model, and assisting with an assessment of Maryland’s green infrastructure.

Along with growth at the Center, of course, has come change. Public Policy Professor Antonio Bento has moved on to Cornell University; Arnab Chakraborty received his Ph.D. and has gone on to a faculty position at the University of Illinois; and Engineering Professor Glenn Moglen has moved on to Virginia Tech. We lament the loss of these key Center contributors, but hope to maintain a productive, though now distant, relationship. In the meantime, with the adoption of the Environmental Finance Center we have gained the expertise of Joanne Throwe and her able staff and with the creation of the Transportation Policy Research Group we have added the modeling expertise of Nikhil Kaza and Xin Ye.

With all this considerable talent, the Center is poised to address some of the most interesting and pressing issues facing followers of smart growth. These include helping state agencies with the State Development Plan; building an infrastructure for analyzing economic, land use, and transportation issues; financing the clean-up of the Chesapeake Bay; and addressing the problems associated with greenhouse gases and climate change. I hope you will check in with us again in a few years or months to see how we’ve progressed.

Gerrit Knaap Professor and Executive Director

(To read a Smart Growth-related interview with Gerrit Knaap that appeared in the Lincoln Institute's Land Lines newsletter please click click here).