| Speaking broadly, a local master plan is not only something mandated by the Commonwealth, it is also a means to several ends entailed by sustainability: anticipating and avoiding the pitfalls and dangers of an uncertain future, taking advantage of potential opportunities, and making real the community we desire. The process requires realism, rationality, experience, vision, economics, science, philosophy, and politics - things that do not often go together harmoniously.
We hope to facilitate the effectiveness of planning by focusing the attention of disparate interests upon the following three basic points:
(1) Planning must not be hobbled by administrative units in place when the problems confronting communities were very different. Planning the future while looking through the historical rearview mirror can shed light on limitations inherited without regard to the future we see today.
John Pynchon of Springfield bought the land from which Amherst Town was carved in 1658 for real estate speculation and personal gain. When the English settlements arrived in 1727, the land from which Amherst would spring was included within the surrounding areas of present-day Hadley, South Hadley, and Granby. In the beginning, however, everything was Hadley and Hadley planned to remain everything. How would our town planning process proceed if this were still so?
When Amherst was formed as a precinct out of Hadley in 1734, a major reason concerned the financial support of Congregational ministers. Later, there would also be bitter disputes over land and borders. These issues are irrelevant to current problems. We cannot plan for a sustainable Amherst without regional planning for a sustainable Hadley, Granby, and even Springfield. If our aim is simply to sustain retail business and taxable property for the Town of Amherst, planning will fail as each town races to the bottom with concessions to commercial interests.
(2) Planning must have clear criteria by which objectives and goals can be judged and measured.
If a sustainable Amherst means open land and constrained residential sprawl (a goal suggested by the Amherst master plan's emphasis on village centers and a more densely built downtown), then we cannot expect village centers built on or near the outer limits of the Town of Amherst to work against sprawl if such centers simply end up as convenience shopping for more residential sprawl in Granby, South Hadley, Belchertown, Pelham, Leverett, Shutesbury, Montague, and Sunderland. The proliferation of exurb residential Shangri-Las will continue to thrive on supplies carted in via carbon-wasteful auto safaris to big-box shopping malls with enormous parking lots destructive of valuable farm and wetland. Houses not built in Amherst will simply be built in nearby towns, becoming the tax base for those places without preservation of open space.
There must be a concerted effort to determine the limits of the auto-based residential pattern and consumer lifestyle and criteria by which new development sets definitive limits to this familiar carbon-based lifestyle. Planning focused on creating new places to park will not revitalize the Town of Amherst. It will only contribute to the overall problem of sprawl, which has destroyed the town center economy.
(3) Planning must set priorities in recognition of the most dangerous challenges.
The Town of Amherst, like all the towns carved out of old Hadley, plans to sustain itself as a provider of fire, police, education, public works, and libraries. In a fundamental sense, this is what a town is. The elimination of county-level government has weakened a more regional approach, imposing a dependence on property tax, private and commercial, as means toward which towns provide their services.
It may not seem possible, under the circumstances, to reach a sustainable Amherst by prioritizing alternatives to the carbon economy over private and commercial sources of property tax. However, the gravity and immediacy of the climate and peak oil crisis may serve to remind us that towns were not originally formed with the globalizing economy, shopping malls, and the automobile in mind. Unless urgent responses to the limits and dangers of carbon-based industrial economies are included in the planning that we do, neither traditional town services nor human community as we know it can be sustainable at all. |
