Cities Must Bend Over & Accept Population Growth

One of the fastest growing cities in the U.S., Bend, Oregon has doubled in population over the past two decades. Still, it has at least some intelligent thinking about growth. Tom Hickmann, Bend Oregon’s director of engineering and infrastructure planning, shares the fast-growing city’s somewhat unique approach to city planning, and discusses Oregon’s requirement that cities accommodate growth. According to Tom, cities get challenged if they have a “pattern and practice of rejecting growth.” Tom shares the newest infrastructure planning tool, genetic algorithms, explaining how it allows cities to plan better and grow more efficiently. Planners can put the values of the environmental, development, engineering and general residential communities into this planning model to guide a community’s decisions. Co-host Dave Gardner wonders if unaffordable housing might ultimately influence couples to limit the number of children they conceive. The GrowthBusters team also shares some of their own methods of shrinking their footprints – related to showers, wardrobe and coffee. Explore these issues at http://www.growthbusters.org