Deep Dive – Climate Change Series
A gap exists between what municipal governments say about climate action and what they actually accomplish. This article is the second in an eight-part series exploring that reality.
Growth for Growth’s Sake or the Pursuit of Quality of Place?
Over two decades, I came to know two historic North American port cities. As the crow flies, they sit 240 miles apart.
I’m on a street corner in the first city. Recently erected mid- and high-rise buildings made of glass and steel rise around me. Overhead, the nasal cry of a seagull cuts through the air.
I walk a block downhill to a row of marginally maintained nineteenth-century brick buildings. A few have been renovated and incongruously topped with additional glass stories. Behind them, new 20-story towers cast shadows in the late afternoon light. The seagull suggests I am near the ocean, but I could be anywhere—and nowhere at the same time.
Second city. I’m on a sidewalk between two brick buildings. A historic, four-story building on our left bears the lettering, “W.L. Blake & Company Mill & Industrial Supplies.” They’ve added a fifth story, but it suits the architecture. On my right is a newish, six-story Hilton Garden Inn, designed in a way that complements the surrounding buildings.
Walking a few blocks in one direction, then another, a pattern emerges. Much of the historic architecture remains intact, and newer buildings have generally (but not always) been designed to reinforce what exists. The ocean never feels very far away, and I’ve got a clear sense of where I am.
Not long ago, these yet-to-be-named places looked alike in many respects. But over twenty years, between 2005 and 2025, real estate development in the two cities went in completely different directions. This divergence was largely the product of a single dynamic: civic culture. One city is top-down. The other is bottom-up. A comparison of the two illustrates how, in the present day, top-down civic culture often pursues growth for growth’s sake, while the bottom-up counterpart is more concerned with quality of place and resident well-being.
Top-down, bottom-up can be understood in terms of inputs and outputs of the sort that Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba described in their 1963 landmark book titled The Civic Culture. Whereas they assessed civic culture at the national level, our focus is on municipal governance in the context of urban development.
The illustration below depicts the difference between the two cultures. Think of municipal government as having both an input pipe and an output pipe. In a top-down civic culture, citizen input regarding urban development is either ignored or nonexistent, hence the red X. Output primarily reflects the will of those in power. In a bottom-up culture, this red X doesn’t exist. Citizen input flows into government, and outputs are shaped, at least to some extent, by community values and aspirations.
Municipal governments in top-down and bottom-up cultures can look quite similar. For example, both have municipal councils, planning staff, and advisory committees. Yet there is a distinction, which brings us back to our two cities.
As recently as 2005, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Portland, Maine, were both compact maritime cities in comparably sized metropolitan areas with architecturally rich historic neighborhoods and commercial districts that gave each city a sense of place. Over the next two decades, Halifax would pursue the growth-driven, high-rise urbanism of rapidly expanding global cities. During this same period, Portland mostly embraced development that reinforced its historic sense of place.
Two Ends of a Spectrum
Top-down and bottom-up civic cultures are two ends of a spectrum. Any municipality in North America exists somewhere between these two poles. Halifax and Portland make a good comparison because they operated at opposite ends during the first quarter of the 21st century. The difference in their trajectories offers lessons regarding quality of life on a rapidly warming planet.
Let’s better position these two cities on the civic culture spectrum.
To gain insight into Halifax, we can go back to 1970 to find an assessment of its civic culture that remains relevant today. That year, the province brought in a team of twelve prominent “urban specialists” that included luminaries such as Edward J. Logue, former director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority. Their assignment as outsiders was straightforward: assess the region and make recommendations that would help, as the Canadian sponsors said, “maximize and create the greatest growth and development.”
The visitor’s conclusions were blunt. Nova Scotians, they suggested, were living amid the “debris of the British Empire.” Halifax was described as a “governmentally organized town” sitting in a province where the “economic process” was “completely riddled with political intervention.” Its economy, they argued, had long been distorted by the practice of subsidizing “non-viable enterprises.” Decision-making was “top-down,” conducted through “authoritarian, bureaucratic, not very productive” systems. Too often, those in power seemed more concerned with “keeping industries and bureaucracies going” than with improving the well-being of ordinary citizens.
Little may have changed since those observations were made. In the past, the provincial government propped up marginally viable or polluting industries with subsidies. More recently, it has pursued aggressive immigration policies to fuel its construction and real estate industries. Combined, construction and real estate together accounted for nearly a quarter of the province’s GDP (23.3%), making them the largest sector of the economy.
In July 2024, Halifax had 34 high-rises under construction, which was more per capita than any other city in North America. Portland, with a slightly larger metropolitan population (i.e., ~570K vs. ~515K in 2024), had none under construction.
Portland sat closer to the other end of the spectrum during the first quarter of the 21st century. It didn’t operate as some idealized bottom-up culture, but the relationship between municipal government and residents bore little resemblance to Halifax.
Maine has what is called a communitarian culture, rooted in the state’s tradition of town meetings. In smaller communities, people gather to talk, debate, and vote on issues. Portland is too big to govern using town meetings, but the idea of citizen involvement is still prominent. There’s an expectation that community members will take part in public life. According to recent census data, Maine ranked first in the nation for attending public meetings and participating in groups. This reflects a pervasive attitude that government is supposed to serve the people, not powerful private interests. Mainers fully understand that this is often not the case, but the expectation is there.
This has implications for the way urban planning and development worked during the timeframe under consideration. Portland had twenty-seven different community organizations that the municipality recognized in its 2017 city-wide master plan. Eleven were neighborhood organizations. Each had a board of directors, and many held monthly meetings with residents. Most, like the Munjoy Hill Neighborhood Organization, had websites. In contrast, Halifax had none of this.
Greater involvement among Portland’s residents didn’t mean everyone was happy. Yet many of the people I’d meet during trips to Portland expressed informed views and possessed a sense of agency even as they heaped criticism on local government. In Halifax, my neighbors at the time spoke of planning and development with an air of resignation, passivity, or indifference.
With these two municipalities better understood, I’d like to compare their top-down, bottom-up orientations. Here, we’ll focus only on their master plans and the assumptions behind them in order to illustrate the growth versus quality of life divide.
Government Pronouncement or Community Vision?
Writer Edward Abbey famously observed, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” The remark is often quoted in environmental debates, yet it also captures something fundamental about the economic strategies many municipalities pursue. Cities and suburbs alike often chase growth without asking why or to what end.
Halifax exemplified this tendency through 2025 and continues to do so today. “Strategic growth” is the single most important objective that appears in their 2021 master plan for its 55-square-kilometer urban core. This objective dovetailed with a provincial government directive to double the population before 2060.
Referred to as the Centre Plan, its actual title is the Regional Centre Secondary Municipal Planning Strategy. Bureaucratic and cumbersome to read, it is a pronouncement of government intent. The plan expanded the reach of an earlier downtown plan that incentivized demolition, lot consolidation, and significant increases in building heights.
The Center Plan speaks of municipal planners doing “extensive community engagement.” In reality, the government made all consequential decisions shaping development before it unveiled the plan to the public. It is as if they built a house and then let residents pick the curtains.
In Portland, local government began with a different understanding of its relationship to residents.
Portland’s master plan, Portland’s Plan 2030, is well–written and easy to read. Its single most important sentence is the one that says, “The plan is a statement of community values and a framework to advance those values.” Notably, Portland’s plan states it is intended to be widely read by the community and easily understood. Residents actively took part in writing it, ensuring that their voices shaped the plan.
The core of this strategic blueprint is a two-page vision statement, indicative of a bottom-up civic culture. Writing in the Portland Press Herald, resident Lisa Whited addresses the question: Whose vision does Portland’s plan reflect? She wrote,
Portland’s new comprehensive plan is by the community and for the community. It is not the vision of a singular person—not the mayor’s vision, the city manager’s vision, the planning director’s vision, or even the City Council’s vision. It is the city residents’ collective vision.
Portland resident Lisa Whited
Portland residents express this vision through thirty-one declarative, community-based statements, most beginning with “we.” Maintaining and enhancing Portland’s “authenticity” is a central theme, reinforced by statements such as, “We will maintain our character through preservation, innovation, and excellence in design for the built environment.”
Population Growth Versus Quality of Life as an Economic Strategy
These two master plans were driven by different assumptions regarding economic development. In Halifax, there was a widely accepted belief that economic prosperity depends on significantly increasing the size of its population. In Portland, prosperity had been more closely aligned with innovation and quality of life.
What’s notable about this distinction is that as recently as 2015, the demographics for the two regions were virtually identical. Both Nova Scotia and Maine had an aging population and sluggish population growth. Maine, for example, had an annual rate of increase between 2010 and 2019 of just 0.12 percent. Yet, the top-down and bottom-up responses to these conditions were completely different.
Halifax’s most recent push for “strategic growth” solidified in 2014. That year, Nova Scotia’s government commissioned a report that delivered an alarmist warning about “accelerating population loss and economic decline.” The report told Nova Scotians they needed to change their mindset and direction.
The most prominent recommended action in the report was for the provincial government to pursue “significantly higher rates” of immigration. Government-driven population growth was promoted as the key that would unlock the door to prosperity. In keeping with the province’s culture, politicians, the media, and most of the public accepted the premise.
A few in academia, however, found the paternalistic nature of the report troubling and misleading. One critique noted that the report’s authors framed Nova Scotia’s circumstances as a catastrophe to heighten fear and ensure compliance with their “call to action.”
To better understand why “strategic growth” matters to those in power in Nova Scotia, it’s helpful to return to 1970 and the team of urban specialists. Journalist Ken Hartnett recorded their analysis for posterity in a publication titled: Documentary of a Community’s Week-Long Confrontation with Itself. In it, you learn the team found a society “dedicated to underachievement,” possessing a massive “inferiority complex.” Today, Nova Scotia’s politicians and pundits talk about the need for “growth” to make Halifax the next “world-class city” or the “next Boston.” Media boosterism highlights the municipality’s need to be something that it currently is not.
In Maine, it was difficult to find expressions of aspirational desperation. Despite having the oldest population in the country and a marginal population increase, Maine’s 2019 economic plan expressed trust in its people and laid out a measured approach to population challenges. In contrast to Nova Scotia, Maine was more focused on objectives such as increasing annual wages adjusted for inflation and productivity.
Maine appeared to understand that it’s possible to do well economically with a smaller, stable population. Employers emphasized quality of life when making the case for why potential employees should come to them. Maine’s political and business classes did not claim that increasing the population through artificial means would produce sustained economic benefits.
And in Portland, municipal policymakers considered quality of place to be a core tenet of economic development.
Going into 2025, many decision-makers in Portland still understood that success with historic preservation had stimulated private investment. The expectation of Portland’s “city builders” was that they would maintain the city’s “authentic character” in a way that enabled it to “flourish.” Portland’s Plan 2030 prominently laid out these assumptions.
“It is incumbent on city builders to provide excellence in architectural quality and urban design commensurate with the image of Portland in history and today. Thoughtful and high-quality design is achieved through attention to quality of space and placemaking, the relationship of buildings to the streets and built context, durability, and integrity of materials, and a pleasing and timeless quality of architecture; these must be held to the highest possible standards. Practicing and incentivizing contextual principles of urban design are central to the health and well-being of the City of Portland.”
Portland’s Plan 2030
Nowhere in the plan will you find the term “strategic growth.”
Implications for Quality of Place
My wife and I lived in Halifax while I was studying urban planning, and we returned in 2007 because of the quality of life it offered. It was a slightly shabby, vibrant Canadian city with a unique, laid-back atmosphere—qualities that neither of us anticipated would change as much as they did.
Over the next 18 years, the city’s historic urban fabric would be steadily replaced by glass and steel mid- and high-rise buildings. In a literal sense, Halifax began to resemble the skylines of Dubai, New Delhi, and cities across China.
During this time, I’d periodically travel to Portland. To my eyes, the city was becoming a better version of itself.
At its core, it remained a historic, working-class, maritime city rooted in European urbanism. Much of the infill development in both neighborhoods and commercial districts aligned with Portland’s community vision in terms of scale, design, and build quality. There were, however, newer buildings with Lego-inspired exteriors that made one question their master plan’s effectiveness. This said, I found myself increasingly drawn to Portland up through 2025. Nationally, the city’s star rose as it gained a reputation as a place that offered a high quality of life.
To some extent, the city became a victim of its own success, as people with higher incomes moved in from Boston, NYC, and California. Affordability was (and is) an issue. Separately, the city struggled with the fact that services for the addicted and unhoused drew people from elsewhere in Maine, where social services were nonexistent. Portland had these problems, and more, but political leadership and residents talked candidly about them in a way that did not happen in Halifax.
Affordable housing was a case in point. A crisis emerged in Halifax that puts Portland’s housing issue into perspective. Between 2015 and 2025, Portland added 51,394 people and grew by 9.7%. During those same years, Halifax added 107,785 people and grew by 26.3%. Throughout this time, Halifax demolished thousands of affordable housing units to make way for large-scale development projects across the city. The scale of destruction in Portland was minuscule in comparison.
Even before 2015, some Halifax residents predicted how the housing crisis would unfold and brought their concerns regarding wide-scale demolition and high-rise construction to municipal council on multiple occasions. The top-down culture in which they were operating suggested that little would come of their efforts. Thousands of demolished units and dozens of high-rises later, the futility of their efforts had been laid bare.
Nova Scotia’s consensus on using high immigration levels to increase GDP dovetailed with the whole of Canada between 2015 and 2025. Nationally, Canada’s Liberal Party pursued a parallel policy of using accelerated population growth as an economic development strategy. Increase the population quickly, and the government could claim the economy was growing. Construction activity rose, real estate values increased, and developers directly and indirectly influencing government decision-making benefited. So did the nearly 40% of federal members of parliament with significant real estate investments.
Behind all this was the claim made by many supportive of the Liberal Party’s agenda that tripling Canada’s 2015 population to 100 million by end of century was an imperative. The country’s survival depended on it, so the narrative went. One should not consider it radical but rather “essential.” Proponents made a recurring point regarding the “mega regions” that would contain millions of “new Canadians.” A 35-million-person Toronto would be, as Adnan Khan writes, “a boon for sustainability, providing Canada with the population density it needs to build out green infrastructure and reduce suburban sprawl.”
Evidence of this top-down approach to reshaping society was already apparent across Canada by the end of 2025. Writing in the Vancouver Sun, Douglas Todd noted that “Metro Vancouver and other Canadian cities have become ground zero for the battle between Asia’s high-tower approach and the go-low attitude of much of Europe.” Politicians across Canada were engaged in “ever-expanding high-rise agglomeration” as they rapidly adopted “an Asian approach to density.” Nowhere was this more true than in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
This kind of growth says little about improvements in productivity, innovation, or the long-term well-being of residents. By 2022, Nova Scotia ranked dead last in terms of GDP per capita, behind all other US states and Canadian provinces. Its healthcare system was under unprecedented strain. Traffic congestion was the 3rd worst in Canada. Housing was the least affordable in the country, and people were leaving the area. Youth unemployment was near a record high. One in four children lived in poverty, and an already large homeless population effectively doubled between 2023 and 2025.
These were the outcomes of a civic culture in which politicians, the business community, and the media uncritically celebrated “strategic growth.” Halifax was presented as a boomtown. Even after the consequences became difficult to ignore, Halifax’s mayor doubled down on growing faster, saying to an audience that included developers and municipal officials, “The city you live in today won’t look the same in five years.” About the same time, Portland’s mayor gave an extended interview in which he expressed his deep connection to the city. He spoke of the “beauty of Portland” and the draw of its unique residential neighborhoods and commercial districts. In both tone and substance, the two mayors illustrate the sharp divide.
Bottom-up Civic Culture Asks More from Governments and Residents Alike
A bottom-up civic culture requires more knowledge and effort to sustain itself relative to its top-down counterpart. Portsmouth, NH, and Gaithersburg, MD, are examples.
Portsmouth is a small seaport city south of Portland that has been extending its urban core with high-quality, human-scale design. Recent development reinforces what makes their historic center compelling and unique.
Gaithersburg, a suburb of Washington DC, rejected the practice of expanding auto-dependent development over 30 years ago. Since then, they have consistently pursued high-quality, human-scale development whose walkability can be verified analytically.
In both municipalities, elected officials, planning board members, urban planners, and many residents possess a high degree of knowledge regarding human-scale development. They understand it’s synonymous with quality of place.
Pedestrian-oriented, human-centric development is more demanding to design and build relative to urban sprawl in either its horizontal or vertical (high-rise) dimensions. Getting things built in a way that earns broad public support depends on participatory design processes that involve the widest range of stakeholders possible. Participants have to know more, communication channels have to operate well, and trust has to be earned. It’s a lot of work.
Importantly, these design processes don’t manufacture a value system out of thin air. They work because there’s already a shared understanding among a critical mass of people of what constitutes a high-quality, human-scale environment and why it matters.
Top-down civic culture requires less from the body politic in terms of urban development. The propagation of urban sprawl is mechanistic and self-perpetuating. Conventional financing, such as Real Estate Investment Trusts, seeks out standardized, easily repeatable forms of sprawl development of the sort seen replicated across North America. Municipal planners and decision-making bodies are familiar with standardized real estate product types such as power centers, high-rises, and single-family subdivisions. They know less about context-sensitive, human-scale design, or the effort required to get it approved, financed, and built.
In a top-down civic culture, local government excludes residents from meaningful conversations that shape their community. Resignation can be a less painful existence than caring and fighting for something you believe in. For others, it’s simply an indifference to one’s surroundings.
Bottom-up Civic Cultures: Fewer in Number and Always at Risk
In terms of urban development, most civic cultures are relatively static. Others change with time and circumstances. For most municipalities, there’s little evidence to suggest that human-scale alternatives to urban sprawl will prevail. Gaithersburg and a handful of other bottom-up municipalities are the exceptions.
In the 1990s, Nova Scotia’s provincial government forcibly amalgamated the city of Halifax with its surrounding municipalities. Political representation diminished, and top-down culture intensified as a regional bureaucracy supplied the foot soldiers to crusade for growth. The municipality illustrates an important point. Once established, top-down cultures tend to reinforce themselves at the expense of quality of life. Halifax’s future is predictable.
Mindful that bottom-up cultures are more difficult to sustain over time, Portland’s trajectory is uncertain. In 2025, its city council ignored the recommendation of its planning board and voted to demolish a prominent circa 1830s building. A few months later, it approved a development proposal for a 30-story tower at the edge of its historic port district. Both decisions contradict a clear, detailed community vision laid out in Portland’s master plan. It’s unclear whether an impactful bottom-up culture will remain in place.
As suggested, there are relatively few bottom-up cultures. Fewer still have done the necessary work to produce results over time. I’ve written separately about four specific objectives a municipality must pursue in order to consistently produce human-scale development. They’re the core elements of a bottom-up civic culture that delivers on quality of life. The question is whether anyone is listening.
Up Next: Part 3 looks at the climate action plans produced by Portland and Halifax and answers the question, “To what degree does each municipality engage in virtue signaling?” Previously: Part 1, explained why municipalities are at the center of the climate crisis.
