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Sprawl, smart growth topic of architecture lecture
Matthew Dalbey, director of the Federal and State Division of the Office of Sustainable Communities in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and an expert on a wide range of issues related to smart growth and development, will lecture on Feb. 14 as part of the annual public lecture series presented by the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning.
His talk, “The HUD-DOT Partnership for Sustainabilities,” will take place at 5:30 p.m. in 301 Crosby Hall, South Campus. It will be free and open to the public.
Dalbey maintains that smart growth is a definable real estate product with a low supply but a high and growing demand. At UB, he will present an insider’s guide to a new federal approach to community-driven, place-based public policy. He also will discuss how the politics, framing and messages attached to community design and planning impact research, practice and implementation.
“Matthew Dalbey works at the fulcrum of national policy implementation in pursuit of more sustainable forms of development,” says Robert Shibley, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, “and he’s a central player in the Obama administration’s integrated approach to our cities, coordinating efforts in housing, transportation, environment and land use behind a single strategy.”
The Buffalo Niagara Region “has suffered a double whammy in development terms,” adds Bradshaw Hovey, co-director of the Urban Design Project. “We have lots of sprawl, like almost every city in America. But we’ve also had no growth. Dalbey has a lot to say about what we should be doing to fix it.”
The EPA’s Office of Sustainable Communities employs smart growth to achieve economic vitality and a safe and healthy environment in rural communities, small towns, cities and suburban areas. It studies the traditional and contemporary issues that designers and planners face as they work through processes of developing master plans for the redevelopment of large sections of existing cities, as well as for the creation of new cities from scratch.
The office also provides technical assistance to communities and states, produces guide books and workshops, and assists nongovernmental organizations and other community stakeholders in partnering with federal agencies like HUD, DOT and the USDA.
Before assuming his current position in 2010, Dalbey spent six years as a senior policy analyst in the EPA’s Division of Development, Community and Environment. The division collaborates with a network of environmental, land use, transportation, design and community-based organizations to highlight the environmental benefits of best practices and innovations in smart growth development. It also develops policies that support better development patterns, school sitings and a range of other related issues.
While in that position, Dalbey was the co-leader of a project that made the business case for smart growth communities to production builders and developers. He has managed or been a primary team member on technical assistance projects in Teton County, Idaho; Spokane, Wash.; and Greensboro, N.C.
Dalbey is a principal author of “Communities of Opportunity: Smart Growth Strategies for Colleges and Universities” (National Association of Colleges and University Business Officers; Ayers/Saint/Gross, 2007) and “Regional Visionaries and Metropolitan Boosters: Decentralization, Regional Planning and Parkways During the Interwar Years” (Springer, 2002).
From 1999 to 2004, he was an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at Jackson State University, Jackson, Miss. A government graduate of the College of William and Mary, he holds a PhD in urban planning from Columbia University and a master’s degree in city planning from the University of Virginia.
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