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Are the zoning codes that shaped America's
great 20th century suburban boom ready for a retread -- or
a replacement?
Chicago is in the midst of a massive rewrite
of its zoning codes, aimed at preserving pedestrian life and
the city's vitality by protecting the great shopping streets
from strip malls and drive-throughs, its residential neighborhoods
from looming blank walls and loss of front yards.
But in selected spots from South Florida
to Tacoma, Wash., Nashville (Tenn.) to Fort Collins (Colo.),
the very practice of zoning is getting challenged by new land
use regulations -- increasingly called "form-based codes."
Old-fashioned zoning practices are delaying
and discouraging the current surge of mixed-use developments
in the nation's cities, Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution
asserted at a meeting here in January jointly sponsored by
Brookings and the American Planning Assn.
We're not about to jettison all land regulations
-- they've been around since the Norman invasion of England
and are necessary on many grounds, APA executive director
Paul Farmer told the the group of public-sector planners,
architects, developers, and land-use academics from across
the nation. But, said Farmer, it's time we develop new and
more flexible codes that can "serve all citizens far
more effectively than their 20th century predecessors."
The central problem, say critics, is that
we've stopped creating -- as earlier Americans did -- great
cities, towns and neighborhoods, places with public squares
and greens that invite monuments. Nor such inviting features
as shopfront windows lined up along inviting sidewalks.
The chief villain, they say, is zoning,
and not just because most of it's written in arcane language
with complex mathematical formulas. What's even worse, they
allege, is zoning focuses so narrowly on protecting us from
bad development, with long lists of forbidden uses, that it
ends up thwarting healthy mixed-use communities in our time.
Zoning first sprang up to segregate and
separate uses -- to protect residential areas and their property
values, for example, from such blight as tanneries and industrial
plants. In today's world of office, light industrial and residential
uses, that's an almost irrelevant concern.
Now zoning fosters the big single-use pods
of suburbia -- malls and big box stores, subdivisions, industrial
parks, isolated office buildings, accompanied by generally
massive parking requirements. The net result: big distances,
auto dependence, vast road networks, and dull cookie-cutter
places.
So what's the nature of form-based codes,
the substitute now being pushed by advocates of richer mixed-use
developments? Peter Katz, founder and former director of the
Congress for the New Urbanism, reeled off the claimed benefits
at the Chicago meeting.
The new codes, he says, focus less on what's
forbidden and more on what's desired -- the kind of town or
city people indicate they want. Mixed use is welcomed back.
Basic rules are specified -- for example a range of acceptable
building types in any given area, from apartments and townhouses
to detached villas or high-rise towers (leaving individual
design, for the most part, to owners). Typically, the new
codes specify minimum and maximum height, seek to avoid blank
walls, and require building out to the sidewalks to create
a sense of place.
Underlying the codes, says Katz, each area
needs a vision or plan -- a community design, if you will
-- so that private building decisions more easily harmonize
with and add excellence to the public realm we've so neglected
in recent decades, especially our communities' streetscapes,
squares and public buildings.
Let the form-based codes, he suggests, be
simple and straightforward, backed up by easily accessible,
computer-based graphics, and avoid the legalisms and obscurities
typical of so much zoning.
There are barriers: Only a handful of town
planning firms are adept with the new codes -- nearly all
with some connection to the Miami-based firm of Duany Plater-Zyberk,
which "invented" the technique with its pathbreaking
1982 plan for Seaside, Fla.
And of those firms, even fewer have conducted
"charrettes" - week-long community meetings to focus
on redesign of individual neighborhoods or commercial centers
and gauge public choices from real alternatives. Such meetings
(which Seattle planner Mark Hinshaw would call "public
workshops") establish the vision on which local codes
can than be fashioned.
What's against form-based codes is that
they're new and disturbing to many developers, politicians
and homeowners afraid of any change. And they aren't familiar
(and thus reassuring) to big lenders. At worst, University
of Pennsylvania land use expert Jonathan Barnett told the
Chicago gathering, introducing form-based codes says to politicos:
"Let's anticipate every land use fight we could have
in the next 20 years, and have it now."
Most likely, the new codes will make their mark first for
individual projects and only go city-wide or county-wide later.
What they have on their side is their relative
simplicity and "transparency" -- a clear vision
of future development that a community can grasp. Compare
that to the dinosaur zoning codes, and it's hard to believe
history doesn't ride with them.
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