The Board of Supervisors in Albemarle County, Virginia,

The Board of Supervisors in Albemarle County, Virginia, has unanimously adopted The Neighborhood Model, a framework for development in designated growth areas in the Charlottesville region. New urbanist planning firm Torti Gallas and Partners/CHK wrote the plan last year in collaboration with a local steering committee, using the Transect as the underlying principle (see the September 2000 issue). However, according to Albemarle planner Elaine Echols, the board amended the plan and rejected the Transect as too limiting. Supervisors were concerned that every development project would have to include the whole range of the Transect’s rural and urban zones, Echols says. Instead they pointed to historic neighborhoods in Richmond as good models. Neil Payton of Torti Gallas does not see this as a significant setback for the model. “I’m very optimistic,” he says. “ The spirit of the document is intact, and the reality is that the critique represents a desire for a more nuanced reading of the Transect.” The original document provided only “a Transect 101, and the lack of nuance was scary to the supervisors,” Payton says.