New Planning tools for shaping cityscapes in the American Cities

by Biljana Spirkoska

The American city had changed markedly during the first eight decades of the century. The man-made environment experienced a transformation on a scale not seen since the Renaissance.

At the turn of the century, the downtown had been the center of urban transportation, business, industry, amusement, and government. City Hall, soaring skyscrapers, department stores, impressive theatres, mammoth hotels, spacious rail terminals, and a dense knot of streetcar lines- all were part of the downtown scene. The downtown was truly the business hearth of the metropolis, the center of city government, the place where public policy was made, and also it was the transportation hub, where people from all sections of the metropolis crossed paths. The downtown was a shared experience, holding together the varied fragments of the metropolis.

Over the century, the role of the downtown was narrowing. By the 1980s, the American city no longer had a single dominant nucleus. Instead, retailing was increasingly dispersed, industry was spread out along the superhighways and rail lines, and government authority was distributed among the multitude of municipalities that made up the metropolitan area. There was no longer one mayor and city council which had to mediate among the divergent social, economic, and ethnic interests within the city, but each suburban municipality had jurisdiction over a small segment of the whole. Beside the appearance of the office parks, the central-city downtown remained the dominant hub of finance and business services. The diversity of the early-twentieth-century downtown was replaced with rows of towers and office workers. There was no longer any one dominant economic, intellectual, or cultural center to the metropolis. Instead there were many. The city had fragmented, breaking into its component parts.

In other words, the twentieth century has seen a radical transformation in American cities. Paradoxically, this transformation has stimulated an interest in the older forms of cities and increased peoples’ respect for the planning tradition that created them. For example, the single-family suburban tract development after World War II has led to a new understanding of older residential areas where a pedestrian scale and a dense, complex mixture of housing types and other land uses seemed to lead to better opportunities for community. The revolutionary decentralization in retailing and the rise of "Mallopolis" on every major highway has made the surviving older Main Streets a focus for civic pride and redevelopment. This dispersal has made understandable the special value of the central regional downtowns, with their irreplaceable heritage of diversity, public space, historic structures, and regional identity.

Consequently, many urbanists have started to look at ways of retaining or re-creating the qualities that comprise livable, memorable, and diverse community life. They began to develop new tools to address the issues of character and quality. The most influential among these new tools for shaping cityscapes are Traditional neighborhood development ordinance, Mixed- use Districts, and Form- based codes.

Traditional Neighborhood Development Ordinance (TND Ordinance): Traditional Neighborhood Development is a planning concept that is based on traditional small town and city neighborhood development principles. Traditional Neighborhood Development basically means: compact, mixed use neighborhood where residential, commercial and civic buildings are within close proximity to each other.
Traditional Neighborhood Development does not stand for one-solution-fits-all policy. Contrary, it is based on analyze of the development patterns and designs of the past to provide a context for the specific standards contained in the ordinance. Anyways, as cities and villages modify the model ordinance to meet the unique circumstances found within their communities, the ordinances developed should seek to achieve several basic principles: compact development, mixed use, multiple modes of transportation and response to cultural and environmental context.

Mixed- use Districts: Mixed- use districts is another new zoning tool developed to mitigate the strict separation of uses. Mixing use is recognized to have the potential to increase social interaction and enrich civic life, to bring important benefits in efficiency (by optimizing the use of infrastructure), equity (by providing a variety of housing options and better access to services for different income groups), and sustainability (by reducing the consumption of land and the need for cars). In short, Mixed-use development introduces new development patterns that are civic-oriented, pedestrian-friendly, economically vibrant, environmentally sustainable, and evoke a unique sense of place.

Form- based codes: Form-based development codes are a tool for regulating development to achieve a specific urban form. They focus primarily on the public realm and the type of urban form necessary to create welcoming public spaces and walkable neighborhoods.
The most popular form-based code is the SmartCode. The SmartCode moves beyond regulating only the form of a specific piece of land and instead further regulates how a singular form fits into the larger context of the region.

However, despite the mounting evidence that standard zoning rooted in the 1916 New York City zoning ordinance that categorized land uses, created districts appropriate for those categorized uses has many costs, the system remains the unspoken assumption, and the default planning system. In addition, none of these new codes is adopted as a standalone regulatory ordinance. The new codes usually end up incorporated into a local government’s development regulation as: Optional (parallel) codes, Floating-zone codes, and only rarely as Mandatory codes, making the new code a seamless part of, or a complete replacement for the existing zoning ordinance.