Mid-Rise Mixed-Use

In a previous post I mentioned the town of Abbotsford, BC, was undergoing a comprehensive zoning bylaw update to help make them a a liveable, sustainable and prosperous City. I suggested the timidity of the updates published so far made achieving this goal within anyone's lifetime unlikely.

As an example of the so-incremental-it's-barely-moving glacial pace of change proposed, I cited the decision to maintain a specific zone for selling cars: the automall commercial zone. I thought taking a look at the zoning might be instructional.

My main beefs are:

Zoning by use-first, and heavily restricted.

Large setbacks.

No diagrams.

To my mind, zoning ordinances should help to ensure the creation of great outdoor-room streets and repurposable buildings. A human-scale built heritage that can be adapted to changing economic times.

To correct the list above, I'd want to see:

Zoning by 'outdoor room type' first (suburban, general urban, urban core... etc.) followed by a much broader list of permitted uses.

Short setbacks for this, a general urban zone.

Clear diagrams showing those setbacks (and an example lot coverage, building height).

Additionally, permeability requirements, i.e. doors and windows. No long blank walls, whether glass or opaque.

Here are some other car showrooms in British Columbia. Honda has this one on Kingsway. It's not premeable enough (long glass wall) and hardly inducing buzzing street life but the setback and massing are zone-appropriate.

This is Tesla's coming-soon store on Robson Street. It replaced a beauty products store I believe.

I'd like an app to define and visualize t-zones like this please. Here's my demo so far: please download and finish it, oh time-rich reader!

Having defined your regulating plan in Lilac, you could then apply these building form standards (and your public space standards, defined in Streetmix3D) to view your neighborhood plan in 3D (indicated with Vizicities' logo here).

This is a design/drawing methodology that follows the legislative structure of Form Based Codes (unlike artistic or engineering apps like CityEngine and Sketchup) and therefore nudges better outcomes. The least effort outcome is passable urbanism. It takes intentional effort to create the contemporary garbage of cul-de-sacs and parking lots and buildings that ignore eachother.

By sharing around Stoop form definitions, local and/or climate-appropriate building traditions can be applied to each new neighborhood development.

"This is the direction new codes should be going." - Dan Parolek, Principal, Opticos Design Inc.

A nationally recognized thought leader in architecture, design, and urban planning, specifically in terms of creating livable, sustainable communities and buildings that reinforce them. Since establishing himself early in his career as an expert in these fields, he has won national competitions and awards for his work and is often asked to contribute to publications and resources.

Over the years, he has become one of the leading practitioners of Form-Based Coding, a revolutionary new approach to zoning about which he co-wrote what’s been called “the definitive handbook,” and he is a founding board member of the Form-Based Codes Institute.

http://opticosdesign.com/people/daniel-parolek/

Sharing this for feedback: which metrics are missing? How should the five below be tweaked?

Below a mock-up of Lilac. Underneath the balloons is the regulating plan, a figure-ground plan with tzone designations, built by connecting 'outdoor rooms' as described previously.

The five metrics shown as you build your plan are:

The balance of public to private space. At one extreme, lots of wide squares (parking lots?) and wide streets (stroads), and little private land in between. The dispersed city. At the other, nothing but skinny streets, no parks or squares nor boulevards. Medieval density.

Diversity of form. Simply the distribution of t-zones (at the high level, i.e. T3, T4 etc. - T3.1 T3.2 T3.3 isn't diversity).

Intersection density. Simply the number of intersections in the site, divided by the area of the site in acres. May be redundant, but a neat summary figure anyway IMO.

Block length distribution. A histogram showing how the lengths of blocks varies: are they all the same length, are they all short, or long (unwalkable).

Sight line distribution. Is there a better a name for this? It's about terminating vistas. A grid has many long sight lines. Medieval confusion has many short ones. Poundbury has an 'event' every 70 metres maximum.

Four storey mixed-use in Abbotsford, BC.

"What is the difference between an architect and an engineer?"

"The deuce! You ask me a question difficult to answer. Let me give you an apologue.

Once upon a time there was a pair of little twins, who were so much alike that their mother could not tell them apart. They had not only the same features, height, walk, but also the same tastes and habits. It was necessary for them to work, for their parents were poor. Both became masons. They grew skilful, and what they did was done equally well by both.

The father, who was narrow-minded, thought that these four hands, which labored at the same work with equal skill, would produce more and better if the work were divided into two pairs of hands. He said, then, to one of them, 'You will only work underground '; and to the other,' You will only work above ground.' The brothers thought there was little sense in this, as they helped each other in the one case as well as in the other; but, being submissive sons, they obeyed.

Still, these workmen, who, up to this time, had agreed, and made mutual efforts in perfecting their work, did not cease from quarrelling from that time. He who worked above the cellars complained that the foundations were not properly cemented, and he who established the foundations said that account was not taken of the conditions of their structure. They finally separated, and each, having become accustomed to the specialty which had been imposed upon him, remained unfit for anything else."

"I think I understand your apologue; but —"

"But it does not explain to you why a distinction is made between an architect and an engineer. In fact, a good engineer can be a good architect, and vice versa. Engineers make bridges, canals, port works, and so on; but this does not prevent their building lighthouses, shops, factories, and other constructions. Architects should know how to do all these things; they formerly did so, because then the twin brothers were not separated, or rather they were one and the same person. But since this single individuality has been divided, the two halves go each his way.

If the engineers build a bridge, the architects say that it is very ugly, and they are not always wrong. If the architects raise a palace, the engineers exclaim, not without reason, that the materials have been unskilfully employed, without economy, or an exact knowledge of their durable and resisting properties."

"But why do engineers build bridges which the architects think ugly?"

"Because the question of art has been separated from that of science and calculation by this narrow-minded father, who thought that both could not be held in the same brain.

The architects have been told, 'You shall be artists: see nothing but form, and busy yourselves only with that.' The engineers have been told, 'You will only occupy yourselves with science; you have nothing to do with form: leave that to the artists who dream with their eyes, and are not capable of reasoning.'

This seems strange, I see, to your youthful mind. It is all simply absurd, because the art of architecture is only the consequence of the art of construction; that is, of employing materials according to their qualities or properties, and because the forms of architecture are notoriously derived from this. But, my young friend, as you grow older you will see many other things in our poor country, hampered as it is by routine."

Abbotsford, BC has a population of over 100,000 and an urban design taken mostly from the motordom playbook. Here's city hall, for example:

Abbotsford is currently undergoing a comprehensive Zoning Bylaw update which will:

improve the City’s regulations,

provide a legally resilient accessible document,

decrease staff time needed for each development application, and

advance the vision of the Official Community Plan.

That last bullet is specifically for Abbotsford to be "a liveable, sustainable and prosperous City in the Country" which sounds a lot like Howard's garden cities. I wonder if the city's planners and consultants (Urban Systems) might refer to DPZ's recent revival of the idea (and in particular learn lessons from the analysis of English new towns at the end) or look at other entrants to the Wolfson Prize.

Sadly, information published to date seems to imply the new zoning code for Abbotsford will be rife with blunders, doing little to make Abbotsford liveable, sustainable or prosperous. Specifically:

It is proposed to zone by use, as if buildings are not expected to adapt or be repurposed over time, in response to economic changes.

It is not at all clear how plots and streets might transition between zones, as neighborhoods mature.

Building form is controlled by an unnecessarily complicated combination of FSR and maximum height, where clear form and massing permitted ranges would suffice.

It is planned to include car parking minima, instead of letting the market decide what storage space to allocate to bike and car storage, or useable building space.

There appear to be no thoroughfare standards associated with each zone.

The one part of Abbotsford that might serve as a model for sustainable growth is be assigned a special label ("historic") implying it is a quirk of history and an outlier from which no lessons of form or design may be drawn.

Overall, the new zoning plan so far seems static and anti-growth, and overly concerned with some details (parking, uses) while ignoring other more important ones (form/massing, frontage/semi-public space). It's not at all clear to me how separating perfectly compatible uses and mandating car space contributes to liveable, sustainable, prosperous city.

Some sample pages from the byzantine proposal follow.

Proposed new development on a nine acre brownfield site in north London.

In fact, this is a 'grass roots' proposal. The actual developer proposal appears to have little interest in placemaking. Click on the other images for comparison plans.

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Here are some ways that Formr (Lilac/Stoop/Streetmix3D) would mitigate against the bad proposed design:

With a basemap of terrain, natural features and existing buildings, it would be more difficult to ignore the surrounding street network and the River Fleet.

Similarly, the insistent inclusion of a 5-minute-walk neighborhood circle as a zone of analysis serves as a reminder of context.

Stoop t-zone definitions and building types would mitigate against out of place towers and even styles. The area would be built from the same T5 stuff as the surroundings.

In Lilac, streets are placed as whole rooms, never buildings or carriageways alone. This would make the bad plan much harder to draw than the good plan.

In Lilac, red flags for block length, enclosure and view lengths would nudge against the bad plan.

Yonkers wants to turn a barren and polluted city parking lot called Chicken Island into a thriving, pedestrian-oriented civic center of offices, retail stores, restaurants and residences.

The city plans to uncover a stretch of buried river on the 6-acre site, which includes 19 city-owned parcels and a firehouse building to be preserved.

The Chicken Island site was to be the centerpiece of an ambitious downtown and waterfront redevelopment plan called River Park Center. Opposed by many residents at City Council hearings, the River Park Plan included high-rise residential towers, and a sports stadium that planners hoped would attract a minor league baseball team to Yonkers. The River Park Center project, though later reduced in scope, never got off the ground as credit markets froze in 2008 and the economic downturn sidelined developers across the country.

Here are some historic pics of the area, that show the river and previous buildings.

New York's adoption of a zoning code triggered a frenzy of activity in cities large and small. The landowning public clamored for separation of land uses, and developers of restricted communities joined in the call for government control.

Machine politicians joined municipal reformers in the embrace of zoning—it was easy to see that variances, exceptions, and rezonings would open up a cornucopia of patronage and graft.

By 1920 zoning ordinances were in place in 904 cities, including 82 of the 93 municipalities with populations over 100,000. Given further encouragement by a model ordinance issued by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in 1924, a wave of regulation rolled on through the decade.

Site planning procedure. This applies to both brownfield sprawl repair and greenfield. Green and blue are what you put on the plan, red are the guidelines and nudges.

This is how I think sprawl repair planning (and normal neighborhood planning) should start.

Contours (and other natural features like large trees and water) and sun should define the orientation of streets and the placement of neighborhood centres. Earth-moving should be minimised.

Existing buildings - whether a barn or a well or a fence in an urbanising rural neighorhood; or a dead mall in sprawl repair - should be marked out and incorporated. Demolition should be minimised.