"Smart growth" isn't an easy term to explain. And I speak from experience here. For several years, I covered the growth and development beat at The Charlotte Observer, at a time when Charlotte, N.C., was one of the fastest-growing places in the country (second only to Las Vegas among large metro areas). 

As the region exploded, giant suburban developments (you couldn't really call them neighborhoods) the size of whole towns sprung up almost overnight. Crowded schools, infrastructure and roads were unable to keep up. Former farms and fields were plowed over at an alarming rate, runoff threatened the city's drinking water supply, and everyone worried about losing the very quality of life that made the Charlotte region so appealing in the first place.

Small towns overwhelmed by Charlotte's spillover held planning charrettes, a state legislative commission was formed, and everyone was fighting over the costs and benefits of growth and how best to manage it. Here's an excerpt from a story that I wrote for the Observer in November 2001, about a forthcoming report from the state smart growth commission:

The state's population exploded during the 1990s, growing by more than 1.4 million people, or 21 percent. Projections show a similar spurt in the next decade, leaving North Carolina with a population of near 10 million.

The report blames growth-related problems in part on government policies that have allowed sprawling development to sweep across the landscape faster than communities can provide new roads, schools and other services.

The commission, made up of developers, lobbyists, environmentalists and elected officials, says the state should spend more money on mass transit, require communities to plan for growth and allow them to adopt new rules limiting builders. Communities also should be able to impose fees on construction that would pay for roads and schools needed to serve development.

"Addressing smart growth requires a reappraisal of how government does business in North Carolina," the report says.

One of the challenges that I faced was explaining smart growth (in the often very short space allowed by a newspaper story) to readers who weren't familiar with the terms and concepts. It's a more common idea now, but in the early 2000s -- especially in parts of North Carolina that had been completely rural just a half-decade before -- it was frequently a new thing.

Even in Charlotte, where transit and urban infill and other key components of smart growth had been accepted and promoted by planners for many years, people often didn't know how to picture what the community would look like with these new planning principles in place.

Which makes me wish that I had been able to point my readers toward a helpful tool like Picturing Smart Growth, the new web feature launched recently by NRDC in partnership with Urban Advantage. My colleague Kaid Benfield, director of NRDC's smart growth program, wrote about it last week, so I won't go into too much detail about how it all works.

Suffice it to say that I was happy to work on a project that brings to life the ideas and concepts that I was writing about back then. I think that by walking you through a several-step process for how a community could be transformed by smart growth, it really helps you understand what it's all about.

And the fact that these places are all over the country shows that smart growth can be adopted anywhere that residents embrace the idea of a lifestyle and community that doesn't rely entirely on the car.

Charlotte itself has been making strides toward smarter development, and the city's urban center has greatly improved because of it. Not everyone is on board, though. (You can read about the continuing conflicts on my former colleague Mary Newsom's blog.) No matter how much sense it makes from an economic, environmental and community standpoint, smart growth might never be for everyone.

But if you want to get a better picture of what it really means -- and share that picture with others -- I hope that Picturing Smart Growth will help.