This chapter provides a different critique of growth-dependent planning to that provided in the last chapter. It looks to the consequences of pursuing this approach in terms of environmental sustainability and social impacts. It begins by setting out and then critiquing the argument that promoting new development can be a pathway to greener growth. Following this, the chapter then considers the way that growth-dependent planning operates through achieving uplift in land values, and discusses the consequences for urban areas and local communities. In doing so it sets this in the context of existing inequalities within urban areas as both a source of the profitability of market-led development and a consequence of the uneven impacts of such development.

Growth-dependent planning as green growth

The growth in interest in the sustainability of urban areas generally and urban development specifically has put a new slant on the growth-dependent planning model. Sustainability, as has often been noted, is a highly contested term. It is broadly used to indicate characteristics of activities that have economic and also social and environmental benefits. Because of the recent saliency of the environmental agenda – covering climate change, biodiversity loss, soil degradation, loss of flood protection and the health impacts of air, land and water pollution – attention has particularly been paid to how environmental benefits can go alongside the pursuit of economic activity. This has led to an approach termed green growth or ecological modernisation. The aim here is to pursue economic development pathways that will lead to lower environmental burdens through the use of cleaner technologies and associated behavioural change. The ideal is the identification of market niches that target the green consumer so that environmental protection becomes a source of profits.

While originally intended to guide national governments in developing their economic strategies, such green growth has also become an attractive idea for guiding local economic development and setting the parameters for planning urban development and change. More environmentally aware growth-dependent planning searches for the various ways that attracting investment into an area and generating new urban development can assist in long-term environmental protection. There are a number of different aspects to this argument.