Smart city-regionalism across Seattle: Progressing transit nodes in labor space?

- Explores the smart growth planning regime in the Seattle city-region.
- Links smart growth research with labor geography literature.
- Interprets the theoretical meaning of transit nodes in the context of metropolitan labor geographies.
- Interrogates the role of the multi-scaled state in metropolitan development.
- Contributes to extant debates within critical urban geography and urban planning around sustainable urban development.

In recent decades, the four-county Seattle city-region has built one of the few 'containment' regimes in the United States. Metropolitan development policy is organized around growth management and transport principles that seek to ameliorate the ecological, economic, and social effects of both suburban sprawl and economic segregation. In addition to regionally-coordinated urban growth boundaries, which implode new growth back to already serviced lands, planning for regional sustainability therefore also includes strategic efforts to improve extant jobs-housing imbalances through major transit investments in key urban centers. This paper considers Greater Seattle's recent policy experiences with planning transit communities from the perspectives of the regional labor market and state policies organized around sustainability. The paper explores the critical concern that while agglomeration economies continue to produce a variety of employment centers across metropolitan space, relatively scarce public transit investments might be directed invariably to edifying economic centers populated by social elites who already enjoy multiple mobility choices.