ABSTRACT

Although their influence may be slowly waning as global and regional institutions gain in power as well as civil society, nation-states are still the dominant political force in the world, and a constituency whose leadership is essential for sustainability planning. Those of us in the US do not tend to think of our federal government as being engaged in planning activities, especially in the traditional sense of guiding local land development. The idea that the national government had a specific planning policy would be anathema to many Americans, and “planning” is not a word widely used on Capitol Hill. However, the federal government’s actions do of course fundamentally shape physical, economic, and social landscapes around us. For example, national spending on highways, federal home loan guarantees, and tax deductions for home mortgage interest have promoted suburbanization, 1 while federal spending on military research and development has at times promoted economic development in the Sunbelt states at the expense of the “Rustbelt” states of the upper Midwest and Northeast. 2

In many other countries national governments play a more overt and conscious planning role, establishing policy on land use, spatial planning, housing, public transportation, and energy and resource use that shape the physical, social, and economic environment of cities and towns. Britain, the Netherlands, and Sweden have had active programs to build new towns; South Korea and Britain have established large greenbelts around their capital cities; Germany and China have strongly promoted solar and wind energy; and France, Japan, Germany, China, and other countries have made long-term investments in highspeed rail networks. Many countries in the developing world have directed large infrastructure and industrial investments toward certain “growth pole” cities that were expected to leverage broader development in their surrounding regions. Although it has not had explicit planning policy in most of these areas, the US federal government has been a leader in other ways, for example in environmental and civil rights legislation that other countries have reproduced to varying extents.