THE GOLDEN-EGG AS A NATURAL-RESOURCE - TOWARD A NORMATIVE THEORY OF GROWTH MANAGEMENT

Growth management is the branch of urban planning concerned with the t iming and sequencing of land development and the policies designed to mitigate the more negative impacts of growth. These policies are often justified on the ground that rapid or poorly planned development caus es ''quality of place'' to deteriorate, reducing both current welfare and the prospects for future growth (ie., ''killing the goose that lai d the golden egg''), In this article, I evaluate the normative assumpt ions underlying this popular argument. I conclude that the ''golden eg g'' argument makes an implicit analogy to resource economics and raise s legitimate issues of sustainability and dynamic efficiency. Although an understanding of resource economics can provide more normative gui dance than one typically finds in the urban planning literature, using these concepts to make policy is no easy task. Thus the golden egg ar gument remains subject to cynical manipulation by both pro- and antigr owth forces.