August 06, 2008 Categories: Reviews
Form-Based Codes: A Guide for Planners, Urban Designers, Municipalities, and Developers
Daniel G. Parolek, AIA; Karen Parolek; Paul C. Crawford, FAICP
2008. Wiley. 332 pp. $75.
Eighty-five years ago the Louisiana Supreme Court set the tone for 20th-century land use when it explained why the government should keep apartment houses and single-family homes in separate neighborhoods:
The US Supreme Court approvingly quoted this passage in its 1926 decision, Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Company, in which the court opened the constitutional door wide for what has since been the standard way of controlling land use in the United States: “Euclidean” zoning, based on assigning different land uses to different areas.
This kind of zoning did succeed in preventing the harms it set out to prevent – keeping apartment houses out of single-family neighborhoods, factories away from schools, shopping centers away from residential areas. But in the process it created a landscape in which it’s increasingly difficult to live without a car. Even in great cities, new commercial buildings are often isolated and set back from the street with a parking lot in front. Euclidean zoning has also helped provoke endless fighting and maneuvering over proposed developments – in part because the mathematical standards used in Euclidean zoning are hard to understand, and in part because, once you do understand them, you realize that you still don’t know what you’re going to get.
Yesterday’s solution has produced today’s problem, and the latest thinking on land use is now being done by people with a far more benign view of apartment buildings than the Supreme Court held in the 1920s. Over the past quarter-century a different system has been worked out and occasionally put into practice – one that pays more attention to the form of buildings than what they’re used for. Now Daniel G. Parolek, Karen Parolek, and Paul C. Crawford have written Form-Based Codes: A Guide for Planners, Urban Designers, Municipalities, and Developers, a comprehensive guide to the kind of zoning where what you see is what get. They explain the process so thoroughly that almost anyone can do it, and the book is just the pointy part of the iceberg: the authors are also board members of the Form-Based Code Institute, whose web site includes relevant articles, copies of existing codes, and schedules of courses on offer.
“Many regionally adapted building types are no longer built,” the authors note, because of how conventional zoning has shaped the habits of builders, insurers, and banks. As a result, they point out, only two kinds of dwellings have been built much since World War II: single-family houses and garden apartments. And between them it’s been no contest. Few would choose a garden apartment, “because in most communities in the United States garden apartments are built without any surrounding urban fabric, which means there is no added value for living in smaller, attached spaces. They are, in other words, density without amenity.” {66} At least two generations have grown up in urbanistically impoverished environments, so part of selling form-based coding is reminding people of a whole realm of neglected possibilities. {65}
The recipe for a form-based code has three main ingredients: vision, standards, and regulating plan. A vision for the town or neighborhood can be relatively straightforward to develop, if everyone wants to preserve the area in question; contentious, if some want to change it; and challenging in a greenfield.
Then you need standards to guarantee that future buildings will help realize the vision: public space standards (“Ensure that walkways are at least 5 feet wide in [zones] T4 and T3 to provide enough space for two people to walk side by side and carry on a good conversation”) and building form standards (“Never allow parking in front of buildings”). {34, 55}
Finally, you need a regulating plan telling where each standard will apply. The regulating plan can divide the area up in a number of ways – according to building type, frontage type, street type, or, most often, the six basic neighborhood zones defined in the New Urbanist transect, running from T1 (natural) up through T6 (urban core). Finishing touches in the FBC recipe then are administrative procedures for applications and reviews of proposed building projects, and a glossary.
A form-based code can have frills as well – such as block standards, building type standards, architectural standards, green building standards, or landscape standards – but the authors are anxious to quell the notion that form-based codes are all about legislating the fine details of architectural style. “Contrary to popular belief,” they write, “the unique character of most communities is not primarily established by architectural style, but rather by urban and community patterns,” such as lot sizes, thoroughfare design, and the character of public spaces. {108}
“Patterns” in this case is not a vague term meaning that anything goes. The fine print in form-based codes matters: “An additional one or two feet in a thoroughfare’s travel lane can increase the speed of traffic; one foot less on a finished floor height of a townhouse can reduce privacy within the home; and one foot less depth on a porch or stoop can make it unusable for anything besides getting into and out of a house.” {109}
Another example: building placement standards may involve a build-to line, a setback, and either minimum or maximum lot widths. What should those numbers be exactly? Well, that depends on “the documentation of [existing conditions in the] place and local calibration of the code content, as well as an architectural and urban design knowledge that will also allow the code team to understand and test the possible outcomes of these regulations. For example, the appropriate combination of building depth and distance between buildings can often create a more predictable outcome than conventional [Euclidean] regulations for lot coverage.” {41; emphasis added}
And here lies a tension in the book’s enterprise. A good form-based code depends on sophisticated design insights. But the book’s reason for being is to explain the job to people without sophisticated design insights. (How else to change an entire built environment in a hurry?) Hence its incredible level of detail, right down to the best typography to use in presenting the proposed code. {183} The book sets a floor: followed faithfully, it can enable diligent but uncreative professionals to produce a better form-based code than they might otherwise. That form-based code in turn will enable diligent but uncreative professionals to produce a better town or neighborhood than they might otherwise. (Sometimes they need more; code writers in Benicia, California, wished they’d created an architectural pattern book.) {222} But will that floor over time become a ceiling? Predictable outcomes are what residents want; but creativity isn’t predictable.
After back-to-back forewords from New Urbanist icons Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Stefanos Polyzoides, the book itself comes in four parts, each longer than the one before: introduction and history; components of a form-based code; the process of preparing such a code (scoping, documenting, visioning, and assembling); and ten case studies of how actual codes have been developed and (in five cases as the book went to press) adopted. These cover areas as small as a downtown (Santa Ana, California) and as large as an entire county (St. Lucie County, Florida).
The authors are frank in explaining both their ideal and how it gets realized. “As the [planning] process is described here,” they write, “it appears neatly laid out in logical order. But . . . . [t]he nontechnical term that best describes how a planning process works, particularly in a community polarized over growth and development issues, may be train wreck.” {95} The case studies are heavily visual (as is the whole idea of form-based coding), and not always as detailed as one might like. But they quickly demonstrate how actual codes can and do vary by region, politics, and mundane circumstances.
For instance, the unacknowledged czars of American planning – public works officials and traffic engineers – remain formidable. In Grass Valley, California, “the Streets Master Plan ultimately went off on its own tangent and the new street standards created were not pedestrian-oriented”; in Santa Ana, codemakers wish they had addressed “the issue of large curb radii (minimum 25 feet throughout) and restoring on-street parking and two-way circulation.” {245, 209} The planning process in Peoria, Illinois, was so underfunded that “the consultant team could not participate in the Public Hearing Process.” {263}
Sometimes even FBC dogmas come to grief. The book’s authors condemn the use of the floor-area ratio (FAR) in code-writing: FAR “has absolutely no role in FBCs and should not be used. If FAR is used as a primary tool for regulation and entitlement, a developer will simply max out the FAR, thus creating very ‘boxy’ building with little variation in massing.” {318} Yet in one of the most ambitious form-based-code-writing episodes to date, in Miami (one of the case studies), FAR was retained by Duany Plater-Zyberk and company, renamed, and calculated a bit more realistically – in part, we are told, because of “the comfort the city and staff had with using FAR.” {229}
Most admirably, the authors include three pages on “common mistakes” in an appendix. It’s not a blow-by-blow description of a particularly poor job of code-writing (that would be too much to ask), but even this generic once-over is instructive. One way form-based codes go off the rails is in mechanically applying suburban standards – for parking, or open space, or building placement – to urban areas. All the visioning in the world won’t help if someone with good design sense isn’t watching the numbers in the standards.
Euclidean zoning sought to prevent harm. Form-based codes seek to promote good. That’s more difficult, but the form-based coders have to try. “After two decades of repeating the mantra of Smart Growth’s planning goals,” writes Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk in her foreword, “it must be acknowledged that the separated policies of environment, transportation, and housing have had little effect. . . . . The specific details of compact transit-oriented environments must be spelled out in regulations that specify how to arrange a diversity of uses and housing in close proximity, and how to give the desired character of walkability to public space by its dimension, materials, and the qualities of the enfronting buildings. In short, Form-Based Codes tailored for local character are needed to implement the policy intent of Smart Growth.” {xi}
Less plausibly, the form-based coders also dream of undoing distrust. The authors would like form-based codes to make development predictable in its results, and render superfluous much of the NIMBY activism now dogging planners’ and developers’ every step. The authors envision each community’s making a major effort to create an overall vision and a form-based code that implements the vision: then, having labored, the community is expected to “confidently” scale back “its constant watch over individual development proposals.” {89} Stefanos Polyzoides puts it this way in his foreword: “As citizens begin to trust that their code routinely generates harmonious [urban] fabric, the contentious nature of the current planning process is diminished.” {xviii}
Good luck with that. For one thing, not all resistance to new development is due to its unpredictability. In Sarasota County, Florida, notes one case study, “Existing development is typically suburban in character; activist local residents have a history of objecting to infill development at higher intensities.” {273} No amount of talk about good urbanism will soothe nervous property owners’ Louisiana-Supreme-Court-style fears of multifamily dwellings, or their inhabitants. And why should supporters of mixed-use walkable neighborhoods assume that the day-to-day administration of the code will never be sidetracked from its goals?
Euclidean zoning codes, because of their abstract nature, can lend themselves to endless disputes about what particular items mean. The authors want form-based codes to be different. They should be understandable across generations: “Before you know it, there are a new city council, an entire new team of staff planners, and a new generation of citizens, none of whom were around when the code was written. This cannot be over emphasized. The code should be written assuming that the user is not familiar with the community vision or the process that took place to create that vision, and that no one else is either. The code should be able to stand alone.” {173}
But no piece of writing, however clear, ever interprets itself. In the unknown future even the best form-based codes may become fetishized, or used to freeze development, or indeed, in some hands, used to exclude apartment houses by non-Euclidean means. One way or another, tomorrow’s solutions will become the day after tomorrow’s problems. Thanks to this book, form-based codes should make for better places to live; they won’t end history.
#