NOPE, "Smart Growth" deserves the perjorative connotation. It's a 60's Utopian concept designed to redistribute funes from red suburbs to blue cities so that the cities can afford to pay their bloated public payrolls. It's also anti- personal property rights. It's basically an anti-capitalist concept and deserves to be mocked and denied.
Smart Growth is only a new term for a new type of zoning. It is just as bad as, but not worse than, other types of zoning.
The problem is the concept of zoning, which is not a new thing.
My take: Let the market decide. Zonging laws of the last 50+ years have prohibited developers from providng a variety of products ... which the property buying public would choose the way they wish to live.