With the increase of population, more and more people are pouring into cities. The world is rapidly urbanizing. Consequently, urban planning has become increasingly important and necessary to ensure that people have access to equitable and sustainable homes, resources and jobs.
Smart growth focuses on building cities that embraces the E’s of sustainability—Economically prosperous, socially Equitable, and Environmentally Sustainable. To measure how successful the city meets the goal of smart growth, we propose a metric model to identify the degree of smart growth, and evaluate two cities’ metric. Then we offer unique smart growth plans for each city, considering the geography, expected growth rates, and economic opportunities.
Firstly, we construct our metric, Smart Growth Metric (SGM) based on three aspect, Economically Prosperous, Socially Equitable and Environmentally Sustainable. The detailed factors are Per Capita Gross Domestic Product, Mean travel time to work, Per Capita Land, Primary Enrollment Rate (for Prosperous Metric) and Male/Female Income Ratio (for Socially Equitable Metric) and Urban Green Space Ratio (for Environmentally Sustainable).The weights of factors are determined by Grey Relational Analysis. In our case study, we choose Reykjavik and Ann Arbor to measure the degree of success of Smart Growth. Meanwhile, we select three Smart Growth Cities estimated by EPA (United States Environmental Protection Agency) and regard them as the evaluation criterions. We find that the current growth plans of Reykjavik and Ann Arbor both meet the smart growth principles. To estimate the expected growth rates, we predict Per Capita GDP in 2050 by means of Grey Forecast Model. Using sensitivity analysis, we evaluate the dynamic of the model and influence of expected growth rates, geography and economic opportunities. In order to measure geography factor and economic opportunity factor, we introduced two parameters α and β to re-evaluate the weights of the model, and take change of α and β as influence of two factors.
Therefore, we set redesigned smart growth plans. Although the prosperity of Ann Arbor is based on Technology-oriented economy, the city still needs to improve community cohesion and search for renewable energy. On the contrary, Reykjavik should pay more attention to upgrade its industrial structure and develop a denser urban area. The geothermal energy guarantees an ecofriendly development of the city. In addition, we rank the potential of individual plans by Analytic Hierarchy Process. For Ann Arbor, social factors have the greatest potential, followed by environmental factors, and finally economic factors. While for Reykjavik, the most potential plan is industry upgrading, and the last one is environment plan. Society factor have middle potential. Finally, we adjust our plan under the situation that the population increase by an additional 50% by 2050.We find that Ann Arbor is likely to have society and environment problems. However, it will benefit Reykjavik’s economy.
