At a recent meeting about Oregon’s land-use planning system, someone asked how much Agenda 21 has influenced Oregon’s laws and rules. The answer the Antiplanner gave was a big, fat zero. Agenda 21, after all, was written in 1992, while Oregon’s legislature passed the state’s land-use law in 1973. The most radical conception of that law was first conceived in 1989 by 1000 Friends of Oregon.
This point is made by a recent article from the Antiplanner’s faithful allies at the Heritage Foundation. All of the ideas known as smart growth, compact development, new urbanism, or whatever were developed in the United States decades before Agenda 21 was written in 1992. If anything, American planners influenced Agenda 21 far more than they were influenced by it.
