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Topic 6.8 pairs two CED learning objectives. By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:
- Identify the different urban design initiatives and practices named in the CED — mixed land use, walkability, transportation-oriented development, smart-growth policies, New Urbanism, greenbelts, and slow-growth cities (per LO IMP-6.C and EK IMP-6.C.1).
- Define each of the seven named practices and give at least one real-world example of each (per EK IMP-6.C.1).
- Explain the effects of these urban design initiatives and practices, distinguishing praise from criticism (per LO IMP-6.D and EK IMP-6.D.1).
- Cite the five praises named in EK IMP-6.D.1 — reduced sprawl, improved walkability and transportation, improved and diverse housing options, improved livability, and promotion of sustainable options.
- Cite the three criticisms named in EK IMP-6.D.1 — increased housing costs, possible de facto segregation, and potential loss of historical or place character.
- Apply Skill 2.C: given a scenario in which a city adopts one of the named practices, predict a likely outcome over a specified time horizon using the CED-named effects.
Key Concepts
Topic 6.8 is distinct within Unit 6 because the CED pairs two learning objectives under one topic. LO IMP-6.C asks students to identify the practices. LO IMP-6.D asks students to explain their effects. The AP exam treats these as a coupled pair: MCQs frequently name a practice and ask about its effect, and FRQs typically require students to address both. The Skill 2.C designation — "explain a likely outcome" — hints that the exam will ask students to predict what happens when a city adopts a sustainability policy. Both EKs must therefore be internalized together.
How the C and D pair fits together
C names the tool. D evaluates the tool. A complete answer on any scenario requires moving from one to the other: students must be able to state the practice, name an effect the CED pairs with it, and consider both sides.
- LO IMP-6.C: name the practice (for example, "transit-oriented development").
- LO IMP-6.D: explain at least one praise (for example, "improved walkability and transportation") and at least one criticism (for example, "increased housing costs near transit stations") that applies to that practice.
- Skill 2.C: given a scenario, predict a likely outcome consistent with the CED-named effects.
Mixed Land Use
The first practice named in EK IMP-6.C.1. Mixed land use allows residential, commercial, and office activities within a single district or even a single building, reversing the strict single-use zoning that dominated post-war American planning.
Housing, retail, and offices in the same district
Zones that permit multiple compatible uses together rather than segregating them. A ground floor might be retail; the next two floors offices; the upper floors residential. At the neighborhood scale, housing, shops, schools, and workplaces sit within walking distance of one another.
Reduces driving because daily trips (groceries, schools, work) become short and often walkable. Increases street life because sidewalks are active throughout the day rather than only during rush hour.
Contrast with single-use zoning
Most mid-twentieth-century US zoning codes followed the 1926 Euclid v. Ambler Supreme Court decision and kept residences, shops, and workplaces strictly separated. The result was an urban form that required automobiles for nearly every errand. Mixed-use zoning reforms unwind that separation to reduce vehicle miles traveled and bring daily activities within walking distance.
Walkability
Named second in EK IMP-6.C.1. Walkability measures how friendly an area is to pedestrians. It depends on block length, sidewalk width, crossing safety, and whether ground-floor uses give walkers something to walk toward.
Short blocks, wide sidewalks, active street edges
A walkable district has short blocks that multiply route choices, wide sidewalks, protected crossings, slow vehicle speeds, trees for shade, and ground-floor retail that draws foot traffic. Walkability is often measured on a 0-100 index (Walk Score) but the planning principle predates the metric.
Jane Jacobs's 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities argued against 1950s urban renewal and for the fine-grained walkable neighborhoods it destroyed. Danish architect Jan Gehl has since quantified how small design choices (bench placement, facade transparency) determine whether people linger in public space. His long-term work in Copenhagen converted central streets from car dominance to pedestrian priority.
Complete streets
A closely-related term is complete streets: roadway designs that serve pedestrians, cyclists, transit riders, and motorists rather than only cars. A complete-streets standard typically requires sidewalks on both sides, marked crossings at intervals, protected bike lanes, and transit-stop integration. Many US cities adopted complete-streets policies after 2010.
Transit-Oriented Development
Named third in EK IMP-6.C.1 (the CED phrasing is "transportation-oriented development"). TOD concentrates dense, mixed-use activity within walking distance of rail or bus-rapid-transit stations.
Dense, mixed-use clusters around rail stations
TOD concentrates housing, offices, and retail within a five-to-ten minute walk of a rail or bus-rapid-transit station. The underlying premise is that stations are expensive infrastructure and should be surrounded by the maximum number of riders and destinations. TOD is simultaneously a land-use approach, a transportation strategy, and a real-estate investment pattern.
Peter Calthorpe's The Next American Metropolis (1993) formalized the TOD model as an alternative to car-dependent suburban expansion. The CED's use of "transportation-oriented development" is synonymous with the standard industry term "transit-oriented development."
Arlington's Metro corridor as TOD textbook case
When the Washington Metro's Orange Line was built in the 1970s, Arlington County, Virginia, deliberately upzoned the half-mile ring around each station. The result: five station areas (Rosslyn, Court House, Clarendon, Virginia Square, Ballston) each became dense mixed-use nodes, while the residential neighborhoods a mile away kept their single-family character. Today the corridor concentrates more than 40 percent of the county's jobs on less than 8 percent of its land.
Smart Growth
Named fourth in EK IMP-6.C.1 and serving as an umbrella term: the CED specifies that smart-growth policies include New Urbanism, greenbelts, and slow-growth cities. Smart growth is the policy framework; New Urbanism, greenbelts, and slow-growth tools are instruments inside it.
Compact, transit-served, mixed-use growth with preserved open space
Smart growth is an umbrella policy approach that directs new development into existing urbanized areas and infrastructure corridors rather than outward onto farmland and wildlands. Its core commitments are compact form, mixed use, transportation choice, housing variety, and preserved open space.
The US Environmental Protection Agency coined the current policy vocabulary in the late 1990s. The Smart Growth Network lists ten principles (mix land uses; take advantage of compact design; create walkable neighborhoods; etc.) that have since been incorporated into many state and regional plans.
What makes smart growth a policy and not just a design
Mixed use and walkability are design outcomes. Smart growth is the regulatory package that produces them at the regional scale. The policy tools include zoning reforms that permit density where it was banned, impact fees that make sprawl expensive, and urban growth boundaries that set hard edges to outward expansion. Without these tools, designers cannot build mixed-use walkable neighborhoods even if they want to.
New Urbanism
Named as one of the smart-growth tools in EK IMP-6.C.1. New Urbanism is a design movement, founded in the 1990s, that translates pre-war neighborhood form into new construction.
Traditional neighborhood design applied to new construction
Founded by architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. The movement codified its principles in the 1996 Charter of the New Urbanism. It draws on pre-1940 American neighborhood patterns: grid streets, short blocks, front porches, a walkable commercial core, a mix of housing types at a range of price points, and civic buildings sited on prominent lots.
New Urbanism is neo-traditional: it is not nostalgic architecture alone but a neighborhood design vocabulary that produces walkability and social encounter as deliberate outcomes. Form-based codes (regulating building form and street edge rather than land use) are the typical regulatory instrument.
Smart growth versus New Urbanism
Students should not confuse the two. Smart growth is a regional policy framework. New Urbanism is a neighborhood design movement. A region can adopt smart-growth policies and produce neighborhoods that are not New Urbanist; a New Urbanist neighborhood can be built in a region that has no smart-growth policies. The CED explicitly nests New Urbanism inside smart-growth policies, and the exam expects students to understand that hierarchy.
Greenbelts
Named in EK IMP-6.C.1 as one of the smart-growth tools. A greenbelt is a protected ring of rural or low-density land around an urban area that prevents outward sprawl.
Protected rural land ringing an urban area
A statutorily protected band of countryside surrounding an urban area. Development is restricted or prohibited. The greenbelt prevents outward sprawl, preserves farmland and ecological corridors, and forces redevelopment inward. Often coupled with a hard urban growth boundary (UGB) that defines where greenbelt protection begins.
The concept traces to Ebenezer Howard's 1898 Garden City proposal. London adopted the Metropolitan Green Belt in 1938 under the Green Belt (London and Home Counties) Act. Seoul followed in 1971, Portland in 1973 (a UGB rather than a classical greenbelt), and Toronto in 2005 (Greenbelt Act).
Urban growth boundaries as a near relative
The urban growth boundary (UGB) is the American close cousin of the British greenbelt. Portland's 1973 UGB, mandated by Oregon state law SB 100, draws a line beyond which urban services (sewer, water, streets) cannot be extended. Development is channeled inward. The UGB can be expanded periodically, but only after a regulatory finding that additional land is needed. Greenbelts and UGBs share the same intent: hard spatial edges to growth.
Slow-Growth Cities
The final practice named in EK IMP-6.C.1. Slow-growth cities deliberately brake the pace of new construction to preserve community character and manage infrastructure capacity.
Regulatory brakes on the pace of expansion
Slow-growth cities use regulatory tools to slow the rate of new construction: annual building-permit caps, building moratoria during infrastructure planning, phased-growth ordinances, and inclusionary-zoning requirements that make new construction costlier. The goal is to match growth to infrastructure capacity and community character rather than to stop growth altogether.
Slow growth is distinct from anti-growth or no-growth movements. Slow-growth cities still permit development; they just cap its annual pace. Petaluma, California, pioneered the approach with its 1972 housing cap (upheld in the 1975 federal case Construction Industry Association v. City of Petaluma). Boulder, Colorado, adopted a 1976 residential growth-management ordinance.
Praise (per EK IMP-6.D.1)
Per LO IMP-6.D, students must explain the effects of these practices. EK IMP-6.D.1 names five praises, which are listed bullet by bullet below. The exam expects students to reproduce them, not invent their own.
Reduction of sprawl
Compact development, urban growth boundaries, and infill construction reduce the conversion of farmland and wildlands into subdivisions. Portland's UGB, for example, preserved more than 25 million acres of Oregon farmland and forest outside the boundary between 1973 and 2020. Greenbelts in London and Seoul produced similar results.
Improved walkability and transportation
Mixed-use neighborhoods and TOD nodes reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) per capita. Arlington's Metro corridor shows roughly half the VMT per resident of comparable suburban Virginia neighborhoods. Transit mode share in such corridors can exceed 40 percent for commute trips, compared with under 5 percent in car-dependent suburbs.
Improved and diverse housing options
When mixed-use zoning allows apartments, townhouses, duplexes, and single-family homes in the same district, the housing stock offers a wider range of sizes and prices. Residents can age in place, move to different housing types within the same neighborhood, and avoid forced relocation to different school districts as household needs change.
Improved livability
Active sidewalks, short trip distances, preserved open space, and neighborhood-scale retail correlate with higher subjective well-being, stronger neighborhood social ties, and better public health indicators. Property values in walkable smart-growth neighborhoods proved more stable during the 2008 housing downturn than those in car-dependent sprawl.
Promotion of sustainable options
Compact form reduces per-capita energy use for heating, cooling, and transportation. EPA analyses show per-capita CO2 emissions from transportation in compact mixed-use neighborhoods running 30 to 50 percent below those in comparable conventional suburbs. Smart growth therefore serves as a climate and resource-conservation policy, not only an urban-form policy.
Criticism (per EK IMP-6.D.1)
EK IMP-6.D.1 also names three criticisms. The exam expects students to produce these specifically, to acknowledge that sustainable design is contested rather than universally beneficial.
Increased housing costs
Urban growth boundaries and slow-growth policies restrict housing supply. In a region with rising population, restricted supply produces rising prices. Portland's UGB has been widely studied as a contributor to the region's housing affordability pressures since the 1990s; median home prices tripled relative to income between 1990 and 2020. The CED names this effect explicitly, and the exam rewards candidates who cite it.
Possible de facto segregation
When housing costs rise, low-income residents are priced out. Because income correlates with race in many urban areas, the result can be racial segregation produced by market forces rather than by explicit rules. This is called de facto segregation. Transit-oriented corridors in cities such as Washington, D.C. and Seattle have been documented displacing lower-income Black and Latino residents when property values rose near new rail stations.
Potential loss of historical or place character
New Urbanist developments have been criticized as theme-park-like, producing neighborhoods that look historical but lack the slow accretion of real-world urban fabric. Celebration, Florida (a Disney-built New Urbanist town) has been the most commonly cited example: visually pleasing, but critics argue it is placeless. Urban renewal and TOD redevelopment have also been criticized for erasing the historic fabric of existing neighborhoods.
Skill 2.C Application
Skill 2.C asks students to explain a likely outcome in a geographic scenario. Below are three worked scenarios that pair a named practice from EK IMP-6.C.1 with predicted effects drawn from EK IMP-6.D.1.
Country Case Studies
Four cases — one each for smart growth, transit backbone, classical greenbelt, and high-density sustainable urbanism.
United States · Portland UGB
Portland, Oregon, implemented the first statewide urban growth boundary system in 1973 under state law SB 100. The UGB concentrated growth inward, producing one of the most TOD-friendly American regions. It is also the most-studied case of UGB-linked housing cost pressure. Portland is the textbook American smart-growth case, praised and criticized in the exact terms EK IMP-6.D.1 names.
Country page →
Brazil · Curitiba BRT Backbone
Curitiba, under mayor Jaime Lerner beginning in 1971, built an integrated bus-rapid-transit network before most cities had the concept. Land-use rules concentrated high-density development along five structural corridors, with density dropping off perpendicular to transit lines. The model predated the TOD label but is now taught as its clearest developing-country example.
Country page →
United Kingdom · London Greenbelt
London's Metropolitan Green Belt, statutorily established in 1938, encircles Greater London with a protected band roughly 22 miles wide in places. It has successfully prevented sprawl into the home counties but is frequently named as a contributor to Britain's housing-affordability crisis. The UK case illustrates EK IMP-6.D.1's first praise (sprawl reduction) and first criticism (housing costs) in tension.
Country page →
Singapore · High-Density Sustainable Urbanism
Singapore's integrated land-transport master plan couples the MRT rail network with compact mixed-use development at nearly every station. Public housing provides diverse types at regulated prices, muting the affordability criticism that affects other TOD regions. Extensive greening (Park Connector Network, greenery mandates on new buildings) adds a complementary sustainability layer.
Country page →Discussion Questions
- Apply Skill 2.C: a US Sun Belt city has not previously adopted any smart-growth policies. It announces a new urban growth boundary and mixed-use upzoning citywide. Predict three likely outcomes over ten years. Cite EK IMP-6.D.1 language for each.
- Apply Skill 2.C: a new commuter rail line opens in a region currently dominated by single-family suburban housing. Station-area zoning permits 6-story mixed-use buildings. What do you predict will happen to housing prices, demographics, and travel patterns within one mile of each station over 15 years? Cite EK IMP-6.D.1.
- Compare New Urbanism and smart growth as EK IMP-6.C.1 names them. Explain why the CED places New Urbanism inside smart growth rather than treating them as parallel. What is gained by the nesting?
- Greenbelts in London, Seoul, and Toronto have all been praised for sprawl reduction and criticized for housing costs. Apply Skill 2.C: if a region does not want the second outcome, what complementary policies would you recommend? How would you know after 10 years whether those complementary policies were working?
- Celebration, Florida, has been called a New Urbanist success and a placeless theme-park town. Using EK IMP-6.D.1 language, explain how both can be true at once. What distinguishes authentic place character from manufactured place character, and is that distinction measurable?
Classroom Activities
Smart-Growth Policy Design
Students pair up and draft a smart-growth proposal for their own town or a nearby city. The proposal must name at least three practices from EK IMP-6.C.1, cite at least two praises from EK IMP-6.D.1, and explicitly address at least one criticism from EK IMP-6.D.1 with a mitigation strategy. Students present and the class votes on which proposal best balances praise and criticism.
New Urbanism Tour
Students study a New Urbanist town (Seaside FL, Celebration FL, Kentlands MD, or Poundbury UK) using published site plans and Street View imagery. They identify features that implement EK IMP-6.C.1 practices (mixed use, walkability, diverse housing types), then evaluate the criticisms of EK IMP-6.D.1 as they apply. They submit a short written assessment: what does this New Urbanist town do well, and what does it sacrifice?
Vocabulary
Standards Alignment
Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP HG codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2020, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in CountryReports' own voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.
Suggested Skill
Enduring Understanding
Learning Objectives (two)
Essential Knowledge (two)
AP® and Advanced Placement® are registered trademarks of the College Board. The College Board was not involved in the production of this material and does not endorse it. Standards statements above are paraphrased; codes refer back to the official College Board CED, the NCSS C3 Framework, the Common Core State Standards, and other cited frameworks.
AP Practice Questions
- (A) Transportation-oriented development.
- (B) New Urbanism.
- (C) Greenbelts.
- (D) Exclusionary zoning.
- (E) Mixed land use.
Correct: (D). EK IMP-6.C.1 names mixed land use, walkability, transportation-oriented development, and smart-growth policies, including New Urbanism, greenbelts, and slow-growth cities. Exclusionary zoning (zoning that bans apartments or requires large minimum lot sizes) works against these practices and is not listed among them.
Scoring: 2 points for (A) definitions and examples (Portland's Pearl District; Arlington Metro corridor; etc.); 2 points for (B) smart growth as regional policy framework, New Urbanism as neighborhood design movement implementing it; 4 points for (C) with full credit for naming the CED's own language (reduction of sprawl, improved walkability and transportation, improved and diverse housing options, improved livability, promotion of sustainable options; increased housing costs, possible de facto segregation, potential loss of historical or place character); 3 points for (D) scenario prediction that cites EK IMP-6.D.1 terms. Students lose credit for inventing their own effect categories outside the EK.