From a presentation Neal did at last week’s Canadian Insitute of Planners conference:
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How we shape the rules that shape the city has a profound effect on what is possible for the kinds of sustainable (and exciting) urban land use and development that we aspire to see in our cities. Yet, while we often debate zoning (and the other ‘codes of the city’) in terms of what it allows or doesn’t, we don’t often engage in the kind of speculative imagination that allows us to dramatically rethink the possibilities.
In response, as part of the national planning conference held here in Vancouver, we had a panel conversation on the issue and I presented eight trends intended to provoke discussion on the ‘future of zoning’. Interest was strong (the room was full, for a talk on zoning!) and the dialogue continues.
I’ve posted my presentation here.
My belief (and agenda for the future) is that zoning must become more performance-centric, not just form or design-based, and that we must build the institutional capacity to be nimble, adaptive, and responsive to the dynamic nature of our cities and communities. And I would love to hear what others think as well.
Zoning performs perfectly well if the goal is to rigidly control what one can build on his property. Discretionary zoning replaces this system with a qualitative assessment of performance.
Traditionally, the following have been measured and predicted before a rezoning is considered:
1) the abundance of street parking
2) views and shadows
3) the number of vehicles entering and exiting nearby intersections.
These are, consequently, the existing performance measures considered in a rezoning application in Metro Vancouver, and because they’re measured they’re what matters.
Neal suggests, I think, a more systematic, quantitative assessment to replace or complement discretionary zoning. The discretionary system is too labour-intensive to be applied to small-scale rezonings and besides would be prone to corruption. A performance zoning system, as he calls it, could be applied at the scale of the single-family house, enabling incremental rezoning in the direction of rowhouses and small apartments. The problem becomes what to measure instead of parking, views, and traffic. Energy use is suggested, and other factors considered in the discretionary system might be considered.