Let Smart Cities Dive's free newsletter keep you informed, straight from your inbox. Earlier this week, the city council of El Paso, the nation's 19th-largest city, unanimously adopted a detailed comprehensive plan built around the principles of smart growth and green development. With significant economic importance and a rich cultural history, but plagued with sprawling recent development patterns coupled with alarming rates of land consumption and carbon pollution, the city constructed Plan El Paso over the past two years.
It is among the best, most articulate comprehensive plans I have ever seen. In January of last year, I reviewed Connecting El Paso , a precursor to the new comprehensive plan that focused on four key transit station areas. I called the document "a comprehensive guide to smart growth design and implementation" and predicted that it would be a winner when the year's planning awards were handed out. Sure enough, in December the US Environmental Protection Agency honored the draft of Plan El Paso with a national award for achievement in smart growth , judging the effort as the year's best example of outstanding "programs, policies and regulations.
The plan has actually gotten better, and certainly more detailed it runs some pages in all since I reviewed its predecessor. Early on, the new document makes clear that it is time for a bold new vision and commitment:.
Encouraging walkability helps create healthy life styles. Building complete places that enable neighbors to know each other will help create and retain close-knit communities. The plan revives the idea that additions to the built-environment must be functional and long-lasting but also delightful and attractive.
Plan El Paso recognizes that design matters. From those premises, the plan gives priority to reinvestment in downtown; transit-supportive infill development; revitalization of older neighborhoods; balanced transportation options; strategic suburban retrofits; sustainable economic development; respect for nature; and much more. It also gives special recognition to the challenges and opportunities presented by El Paso's location as an international border city and home to a large military installation, Fort Bliss.
