It may look like a fun place to visit, but zoning restrictions make it illegal to construct in most of the U.S.

As I reported, I was in Austin last week for the SmartCode Workshop that is presented twice each year. I think a fair question would be, "Why is this of interest to Garland?"

First, I'd like to say that I'm very reluctant to embrace fads. I think we have all seen too many of "the latest thing" that fizzled and usually for good reason. (Well, maybe the Betamax should have been an exception but VHS won. Now it's practically history too.)

Second, after over eight years of being a Garland Plan Commissioner, years of working with cities on zoning-related projects, and as someone in the corporate world that actually had his own planning staff to more effectively work with city staffs, I have come to the conclusion that our conventional suburban zoning may be just that: a passing fad.

The quote below is the very first part of the official Commentary to the SmartCode and, as it relates, our current system of zoning used in this country now, started not long after World War II. It was a new fad. Many of the ills we see in our current communities, having to drive for everything, work or milk or soccer, to the lack of civility and to the affects of little exercise, can be partially traced to how we are constructing our communities. If you don't like it that way, too bad—that's the law and anything else is illegal.

I don't advocate throwing our current code out with the baby and the bathwater and neither does the authors of the SmartCode. They advocate, and I agree, allow both codes to exist, because they can, and allow developers to choose which works best for them. Just keep the playing field level between the two.

Opening portion of the Commentary to the SmartCode:

 

Many of the most-loved traditional towns of North America were deliberately and thoughtfully planned. Countless other cities, towns, and villages evolved as compact, walkable, mixed-use places, because of their geography and because of the limits of the economic and circumstances of their time. However, in our time, over the past sixty years, places have evolved in a completely different form. They have spread loosely along highways and haphazardly across once-open country, enabled by the widespread ownership of automobiles, cheap petroleum, and generalized wealth.

 

The corresponding codes incorporate zoning practices that separate our homes from offices, shops, churches, and schools. They include design standards that favor the automobile over the pedestrian. They respond to the homogenizing effects of globalization.

 

These practices, since World War II, have produced strip shopping, big box stores with enormous parking lots, and sadly gutted downtowns. They have produced tracts of banal housing that consume farmland and forests. They have produced the invention and proliferation of drive-by eateries and billboards. They have made walking or cycling beyond one’s own cul-de-sac dangerous or even impossible. They have made children, the elderly, and the poor dependent on those who can drive. There has been simultaneous destruction of both towns and open space—the 20th Century phenomenon known as sprawl.

 

The form of our built environment needs a 21st Century correction. But in most places, it is actually illegal to build a traditional town or neighborhood like those where our grandparents lived. The existing codes prevent it. In most places, people do not have a choice between sprawl and traditional urbanism. Economics and politics favor sprawl and conventional suburban development (CSD). It is not a level playing field.

 

The SmartCode was created to attack this problem at the point of decisive impact—the intersection of law and design. It is a form-based code, meaning it envisions and encourages a certain physical outcome—the form of the region, community, block, and/or building. Form-based codes are a different type from conventional codes that are based primarily on use, process, performance or statistics—none of which envision or require any particular physical outcome.

 

The SmartCode is the innovative model design and development code released by Duany Plater-Zyberk and Company (DPZ) in 2003, after two decades of research and internationally acclaimed built results.

 

[Return to Website]