by: admin
Rendering of a Miami street
City of Miami Planning Department
Event: Miami21 New Zoning: New Lessons for New York?
Speakers: Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, FAIA, principal, Duany Plater-Zyberk (DPZ); Jerilyn Perine, executive director, Citizens Housing & Planning Council (respondent); Michael Kwartler, FAIA, planning & zoning consultant, Michael Kwartler & Associates (respondent); Ray Gastil, AICP, GastilWorks, former Planning Director, Seattle/Borough of Manhattan (respondent); Ernie Hutton, FAICP, Assoc. AIA, Hutton Associates (moderator); John Massengale, AIA, chair, Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) New York (introduction)
Organizers: AIANY Planning and Urban Design Committee, CNU New York, CHPC, and NY Metro Chapter APA
Location: Center for Architecture, 02.09.2012
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, FAIA, and Andrés Duany, FAIA, have long maintained that American cities bear the environmental, economic, and social burdens of sprawl not because people prefer it, but because conventional zoning requires it. The historical need to separate noxious industries from residences hardened into legal mandates for single-use districts, locking in various unintended consequences (in particular, exaggerated automobile dependence) and making a common-sense remedy, the revival of mixed-use urbanity, illegal to build. Rewrite the codes, say CNU and smart-growth spokespersons, so that planners and architects are free to respond to environmental logic and latent popular demand, and it will improve walkability, local commerce, transportation, and the quality of urban life.
Years of patient planning as well as persuasion have paid off. Miami is the nation’s first major city to adopt a form-based zoning code, addressing the forms and scales of public space, not buildings’ private uses. In a comprehensive effort under former mayor Manny Diaz between 2005 and 2009, a team led by DPZ adapted the CNU’s transect system into a new regulatory framework. Plater-Zyberk’s detailed presentation explained how the new code applies the principles of staged transitions and orderly density management to the specific conditions of Miami, a city of “corridors becoming nodes at intersections” and diverse, if underused, transit options. Miami’s future growth will concentrate at those nodes, Plater-Zyberk expects, and its neighborhoods will gain coherence as well as the vibrancy of mixed uses.
Miami21 is not a tweak of the prior code—“a palimpsest of reactions to undesirable conditions, accumulated over many years,” as Plater-Zyberk described it—but a whole new framework affecting siting, configurations, density, landscaping, parking, and relations between private property and the public realm. Inevitably, its development involved political negotiations. Plater-Zyberk has heard form-based codes assailed variously as “a provincial uprising to constrain architectural creativity” and as “a liberal conspiracy to abrogate property rights and force the demise of the automobile industry,” to cite two common charges. Every form-based code differs, accounting for community preferences and voter blocs; the Miami21 team went through exhaustive hearings to make the process rational and participatory, she noted, enumerating tangible victories while acknowledging certain failures. Summarizing extensive technical material while recognizing that the audience may have heard misinformation about form-based codes, she commented, “There’s nothing to fear here.”
The code, which took effect in 2010, reduces McMansion-construction incentives, parking requirements, and the overall area of impermeable pavement, while restoring urban features such as sidewalks and outbuildings. It regularizes successions between transects: if a developer wants a tall (T6-scale) tower in or near a low-rise T3 area, the intermediate T4 and T5 levels must also be included, removing jarring adjacencies and respecting small homeowners’ interests. It also simplifies a bewildering list of functional categories and measures building height in stories, not feet, aiding design flexibility. Replacing floor-area ratio (FAR) calculations with floor-lot ratios (FLR), which include parking area as well as habitable floor space, creates incentives to reduce parking loads and gain rentable or salable space. Added capacity in higher-density zones is exchanged for community benefits, particularly affordable housing.
New York City’s many ties to Florida include historic experiments in smart growth: the first two form-based codes adopted in the U.S., noted local CNU chair John Massengale, AIA, were at Seaside and Battery Park City. Panelists and audience questioners explored the implications of Miami21 for New York and other cities: while avoiding the temptation to view form-based codes as a one-size-fits-all panacea, many were heartened by Miami’s demonstration that entropy, paralysis, and piecemeal incrementalism are not inevitable. “The biggest lesson from Miami,” commented the Citizens Housing & Planning Council’s Jerilyn Perine, “is, they did something! They changed something! … In reading the code, it’s almost lyrical. You could actually read it and understand it; it was really refreshing.” This sense of accessibility may foster the code’s most lasting effects: transforming a culture that has grown too accustomed to a disjuncture between regulatory structures and the values underlying thoughtful planning.
Bill Millard is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in OCULUS, Icon, Content, The Architect’s Newspaper, and other publications.