Sustainable urban development - Adapting regulations

NRU
Sept. 9, 2015
By Leah Wong

To mitigate the impact of climate change on municipalities, city design and planning staff need to start integrating policies across disciplines relating to environmental soundness and resilience. The challenge is the existing development regulations, which reacted to planning problems of previous generations.

Ecodesign for Cities and Suburbs a new book by University of Pennsylvania city and regional planning emeritus professor of practice Jonathan Barnett and former City of Vancouver co-chief planner Larry Beasley explores how ecodesign can adapt the design of the built environment.

One of the biggest challenges to making North American municipalities more compatible with the environment is existing development regulations, which tend to be rigid and derived from century old laws and practices. For example, growing car ownership in the past produced a series of regulations to accommodate parking and faster-moving traffic.

“Supposedly objective, these regulations have distorted the shape and character of urban life in ways not predicted or understood when they were first applied,” write Barnett and Beasley.

The authors say this has led to three “blind spots” in today’s regulations - treating land as a commodity rather than an integrated ecosystem, separating land uses and varying densities, and creating arbitrary zoning codes. These have resulted in cardependent communities, suburban sprawl and a blindness to natural systems.

In the past, regulatory maps showed what was permitted but ignored the natural landscape and its capacity to survive the changes. Today, municipalities have the opportunity to use GIS to map ecological information and inform development regulations.

To develop more compact, mixed-use and walkable communities Barnett and Beasley suggest regulations should be based on interacting principles that apply to zoning, building and parking codes. These regulations should allow a combination of activities, while moderating any negative impacts of differing uses.

Attention to detail is crucial when it comes to regulating mixed-use buildings. For example, when building residential units over shops and restaurants setbacks and attention to the location of garbage facilities and kitchen venting, for example, can mitigate the noise and fumes associated with living over a commercial property.

The authors suggest that like mixing uses, density diversity is important in creating compact communities. Allowing townhouses to be located near taller apartment buildings or a range of office building sizes would open up vistas and offer privacy in taller buildings.

Under the system of zoning used by most municipalities, Barnett and Beasley say zones are based on arbitrary rather than functional categories. Many residential areas, for example, are zoned in a way that requires a single specific building lot size. The authors say this same-sized-lot zoning is a big contributor to urban sprawl.