Smart growth is a relatively new movement in the United States, at least by name, a movement promoted since the early 1990s as a new way to direct growth and development, especially in urban areas, away from sprawl and toward urban centers of various kinds. There seems to be no universally accepted definition of smart growth, and that alone indicates problems in agreement about what it is, what its goals are, the nature and extent of its benefits and impacts, and to what degree it can be implemented.

Disagreements seem to be more at the level of specific issues rather than broad goals, however, and a fairly simple if still broad and somewhat vague definition can be readily distilled from a rapidly increasing literature. A composite definition suggests that smart growth is growth management rather than "control of growth," and probably no one would disagree with...