The leading candidate for governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, is calling for limits on development sprawl to help perk up the depressed upstate economy.

In recent policy speeches, the state attorney general has raised the banner of “smart growth,” a development and land use strategy that favors building neighborhoods that are compact and have a main street feel, taking advantage of existing infrastructure, and protecting open spaces and farmland. It opposes suburban and exurban sprawl, driving, and “big-box” stores like Wal-Mart.

The attorney general, who recently compared upstate New York to Appalachia, is pitching smart growth as a way to revitalize upstate industrial cities like Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse, whose populations have faded along with jobs. The development strategy would extend down to Long Island, where, to relieve traffic congestion, Mr. Spitzer supports expanding Long Island Rail Road’s main line.

His embrace of the movement reflects a desire for the state government to play a greater role in urban planning, a change in course for a state whose villages, cities, and counties have closely guarded New York’s home rule tradition. In New York, there have been scattered attempts by communities to erect smart growth neighborhoods, for example in Saratoga County and in Smithtown, Long Island, where an attempt to build a smart growth model on the site of a defunct psychiatric center fell victim to squabbling between developers and politicians.

A notoriously polarized debate over smart growth has inflamed communities across the nation from Oregon to Maryland. Opponents say it drives up property costs, pushes residents farther away to escape zoning restrictions, and is based on a faulty assumption that people will abandon their cars for mass-transit alternatives. They contend that most people prefer the freedom of driving, like living in lower-density areas, and want to shop in big-box stores that offer lower prices.

“You end up driving people further away,” a demographic and transportation consultant, Wendell Cox, said. “You can’t force people to move into the city.”

“That’s not the case,” said a spokeswoman for Mr. Spitzer, Christine Anderson. “There is very strong demand for housing options that take advantage of existing infrastructure and that preserve open space.”

If elected, the attorney general said he would create a cabinet level position responsible for “urban issues” and would form a new “office of urban revitalization” within the Department of Economic Development.

Smart growth is needed, he says, to prevent sprawl, which he thinks hurts the economies of cities, adds to pollution and traffic, and destroys wildlife habitats. “Smart growth creates livable, economically viable, and environmentally valuable communities with a high quality of life – communities in which people want to live and work,” he said in a speech late last month in Albany. “And smart growth makes good business sense.”

Yet in Oregon, which has the most stringent anti-sprawl regulations in the nation, voters last year approved a property rights law that forces the government to reimburse owners whose property value has been reduced by the state’s regulations. The success of Measure 37, as the new law is called, was seen as an attack on the growth restrictions.

Critics also point to the example of Maryland, whose former governor Parris Glendening was an early proponent of smart growth policies and vowed to limit sprawl. Years after the state adopted incentives for spending on designated smart growth areas, development patterns have hardly changed, the Washington Post reported in 2004.

In his speeches, Mr. Spitzer has said he supports limiting sprawl but has not specified that he would impose growth boundaries.

Mr. Cox, who is based in Illinois, said Mr. Spitzer’s comments on smart growth suggest that the attorney general would take a harder stance against sprawl than Mr. Pataki has done.

“I would be very concerned that you’re going to have recommendations to impose a state land-use regulation system that limits local authority,” he said.

“I have no evidence that Spitzer or New York State is likely to do that,” said Ray Bromley, a professor of planning at SUNY Albany. New York, he said, has always “rejected comprehensive, regional, and state-wide planning that imposes urban growth boundaries.”

In his second-term, Governor Pataki created a grant-making program called “Quality Communities,” which has doled out several million dollars over more than five years, but has generally faded into obscurity. By design the program lacked teeth. Its Web site insists that it “each community must decide how it wants to grow and develop.”