By Dan McCue
Staff Writer

John Knott believes embracing smart growth isn’t so much a matter of grasping a new trend as it is bringing life to a development model that was the norm when his grandfather started the family business in 1908.

“We only used to do smart growth—look at Park Circle,” said Knott, president and CEO of The Noisette Co. “That’s the ultimate in smart growth, and it was developed in 1913.”

A year earlier, in 1912, a group of Charleston businessmen formed a development company, bought the Burton tract from the family of that name and began to lay out a design for an industrial city.

The circle, as implied by its name, was designed as a series of rings, with the inner ring dedicated to residential development, the next series of rings to industrial uses and the next to farms. Diagonals, along which commercial businesses could grow, dissected the rings.

In that respect, it was in keeping with the “Garden City” style of development that had flowered in Great Britain a few decades earlier and was then gaining popularity in some parts of the United States.

In addition to establishing a precedent for mixed-use development, the Garden City style also stressed the importance of green space. In his book Town Planning in Practice, Raymond Unwin, one of the leading proponents of the movement in England, said, “Not more than one-sixth of any site should be covered by buildings.”

Although the Garden City style never really caught on here—its British creators later acknowledged they drew too hard a line against building density for the style to be practical—Knott said smart growth, or rather building and development that was designed with practicality at the forefront, continued to be widely practiced into the 1940s and ’50s.

“Look at the way we used to build in the middle of the last century,” he said. “You had total ventilation because buildings were built intelligently. Then came air conditioning, and labor and material became cheaper, and the goals changed. Suddenly, it was no longer about livability but profitability.

“Smart growth isn’t a new idea. It is a rediscovery of the principles used to build the great cities and great places of the world—Charleston, New York City, Old Summerville, these places work.”

Dan Emerine of the Smart Growth Network in Washington, D.C., an advocacy organization formed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and several nonprofit entities, said smart growth isn’t about nostalgia.

“It’s taking all the experience that has built up over thousands of years and making it work more effectively for today,” Emerine said.

Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@charlestonbusiness.com.

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