[getsmart-l] URBAN PLANNING: Splicing the DNA of Sprawl - for your consideration

[John O'Gorman]

URBAN PLANNING: Splicing the DNA of Sprawl 

JOHN BARBER ?jbarber at globeandmail.com  Globe and Mail Sept. 11/07

First, it was "new urbanism" - a suspiciously suburban attempt to reintroduce front doors and sidewalks to mainstream America. It gained a lot of publicity but never escaped its shallow, theme-park inspiration, its greatest success being a private town in Florida developed by the Walt Disney Company. 

Then serious minds determined to remake a degraded landscape, beginning with then-U.S. vice-president AI Gore, came up with better buzz. "Smart growth" offered the cake and its eating, focusing more on substance than trimmings. It was so effective that all growth quickly became smart growth, even though much of it looked exactly like the same old sprawl. 

Perhaps that rhetorical misstep explains why the latest fad in U.S. planning comes with such a dreary catchphrase. Unlike its predecessors, however, "form-based codes" really could make a difference. This time, the reformers have targeted what they call "the DNA of sprawl" - conventional zoning codes 

-that regulate use and density  - hoping to replace them with urban-design rules that produce predictable physical results. With form-based codes, front doors and sidewalks become basic law. 

The advantage of the new approach became clear yesterday at a conference organized by the Urban Land Institute, the leading U.S. development industry association. While developers remained cool to the earlier innovations of new urbanism and smart growth, many of them appear to be crying out for form-based codes. 

One of them is Dwight Merriam, a Connecticut lawyer who literally wrote the book on U.S. land-use regulation ~ The Complete Guide to Zoning, alleged by conference organizers to be a bestseller - and came to Toronto yesterday to declare its failure. 

"I can tell you zoning has failed us in terms of placemaking," Mr. Merriam said, describing it as a crude method of nuisance-avoidance that undermines both public and private interests. Restrictive zoning codes are designed by authorities who expect the worst from developers, according to Mr. Merriam. "And what does the development community give them? Exactly what they expected." 

To U.S. developers, urban design is exciting because it can help speed the approval of their projects. That's why so much design-based planning is initiated by developers in defiance of outdated zoning codes. Its processes provide neighbours with something to approve of instead of merely to oppose, if only because its results are predictable. It also reintroduces the missing concept of quality to the regulatory process, according to Howard Scwesinger of New York's Meridian Development Partners. 

Some public authorities are embracing the concept with equal zeal. California municipalities that have ditched zoning in favour of form-based codes have experienced significant new investment, according to Rick Cole, city manager of Ventura. "They're a crucial ingredient to making great places in 21st-century America," he said. 

And to prove it, he showed a picture of a Wal-Mart with a front door on the sidewalk and not a single stall of surface parking. 

That's more than Toronto has ever managed to achieve, in spite of years of effort and an Official Plan that pioneered many of the techniques of the new form-based codes - using building envelopes and traditional design tools to regulate development instead of density calculations and land-use restrictions. Unlike the most progressive U.S. jurisdictions, however, Toronto never abandoned its underlying zoning codes - and they have lived on to demolish the promise of the new plan. 

Our only excuse is that the Ontario Municipal Board is the crudest and stupidest land-use regulator in the history of human civilization. There's nothing in the latest U.S. innovation to deal with a monstrosity like that. 
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