the United States' "most ambitious smart growth project". In Savannah, Georgia (US) the historic Oglethorpe Plan has been shown to contain most of the elements of smart growth in its network of wards, each of which has a central civic square. The plan has demonstrated its resilience to changing conditions, and the city is using the plan as a model for growth in newer areas. In Melbourne, Australia, almost all new outer-suburban developments are master planned, guided by the principles of smart growth. Smart growth, urban sprawl and automobile dependency Whether smart growth (or the "compact City") does or can reduce problems of automobile dependency associated with urban sprawl have been fiercely contested issues over several decades. A 2007 meta-study by Keith Barthomomew of the University of Utah found that reductions in driving associated with compact development scenarios averaged 8 percent ranging up to 31.7 percent with the variation being explained by degree of land use mixing and density. An influential study in 1989 by Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy compared 32 cities across North America, Australia, Europe and Asia. The study has been criticised for its methodology but the main finding that denser cities, particularly in Asia, have lower car use than sprawling cities, particularly in North America, has been largely accepted — although the relationship is clearer at the extremes across continents than it is within countries where conditions are more similar. Within cities studies from across many countries (mainly in the developed world) have shown that denser urban areas with greater mixture of land use and better public transport tend to have lower car use than less dense suburban and ex-urban residential areas. This usually holds true even after controlling for socio-economic factors such as differences in household composition and income. This does not necessarily imply that suburban sprawl causes high car use, however. One confounding factor, which has been the subject of many studies, is residential self-selection: people who prefer to drive tend to move towards low density suburbs, whereas people who prefer to walk, cycle or use transit tend to move towards higher density urban areas, better served by public transport. Some studies have found that, when self-selection is controlled for, the built environment has no significant effect on travel behaviour. More recent studies using more sophisticated methodologies have generally refuted these findings: density, land use and public transport accessibility can influence travel behaviour, although