SmartCode set for year-end debut

Santa Fe Council tries to organize efforts toward zoning reform. Before New Year’s Day, the SmartCode developed by Duany Plater- Zyberk & Company will make its long-awaited debut. “We intend to start printing it before the end of the year,” Rick Grant, executive vice president of Municipal Code Corporation, told New Urban News when final agreement on the SmartCode’s contents was reached Nov. 14. The announcement came as a welcome epilogue to the CNU Council’s discussions in Santa Fe in mid-October about the pressing need for zoning reform. Local zoning codes, which exert an enormous influence on what can be built across the US, have been slow to adapt to New Urbanism. The SmartCode is one of many responses to the need for codes that will foster development of mixed uses and unify city and town settings through cohesive building forms. “We’ve been working with DPZ for almost two years,” Grant said. His company, also known as Municode, calls itself “the largest codifier of municipal law in the US.” Approximately 2,400 municipalities are customers, buying codes and ordinances of all kinds from the Jacksonville-based company. The SmartCode, running between 60 and 70 pages, will be available by mail and electronically, selling for $156. On top of that charge, a municipality wishing to implement the code must buy a license from Municode to use the code within its geographical area. (Charging licensing fees is standard practice in the distribution of government codes, Grant said. “There are about 22 companies that do this.”) Municode intends to carry out “an extensive marketing plan” to reach architects, lawyers, municipalities, and other potential customers. Information may be obtained on the Internet at http://www.municode.com. The Santa Fe Council dealt with efforts to impose New Urbanism’s principles on the built environment. Paul Crawford of Crawford Multari & Clark Associates, a planning, environment, and public policy firm in San Luis Obispo, California, said one of the problems with conventional zoning codes is that they are “written to prevent things, not to produce positive change.” A new urban code, he said, should be place-based; purposeful rather than reactive; and graphic (easy to understand and use). It should “connect urban form and land use” and “should be designed to be updated.” Generally, new urbanists are less restrictive than conventional codes about the uses that can operate in an area. New urban codes try to produce compatible building forms, within which a sometimes wide variety of uses is allowed. Even so, use issues must be addressed, various participants observed. In infill development, it’s possible to be quite specific about allowable uses, said Rick Bernhardt, head of the Metropolitan Planning Department in Nashville-Davidson County, Tennessee. Metro Nashville is at the forefront of new urban planning and zoning. Bernhardt said his department “has developed a complete transect map for the county, has broken the community into 14 areas for structure plans,” and has been carrying out charrettes that result in detailed neighborhood regulating plans. “We’re now working on how to implement them through codes.” Participants in Santa Fe seemed to agree that there can be no single set of standards to be adopted everywhere. Regulation of development has to reflect local situations and state laws. The consensus was that more design professionals should be added to the CNU Planners Task Force, which is writing a report attempting to define the new urban zoning approach and to explain how communities can start shifting to this kind of regulation. The report is expected to be an American Planning Association Planners Advisory Service publication. No date has been set for its completion. Bernhardt is leading the Task Force effort.