It seems that it doesn’t take a riot to create substantial inner city disinvestment; our markets can do it on their own. While, the recent real estate boom did produce housing reinvestment in and adjacent to many of our downtowns, this investment seldom followed into older, underperforming neighborhoods. Is there something endemic in our market economy, our development processes and our national psyche that causes development to bypass the inner city and continue to grow outward? What, if anything can we do about it?

One challenge of the last century focused on coping with increasing population growth. Most cities responded by accommodating an outward expansion into the countryside. New populations, especially working class immigrants, occupied older, developed places whose original population moved to the suburbs.

But when a replacement population is no longer available, inner city areas experience property abandonment and under utilization of existing housing stock. The impact of the ongoing mortgage foreclosures and related relate credit crunch will exacerbate this problem for the foreseeable future..

Consider the insidious process that we are experiencing: land development, even in “stagnant” cities, still tends to follow the historic pattern of new investment at the urban periphery. This is reinforced by transportation improvements that cater to the demands of the edge and, in so doing, increase the attractiveness of outlying sites for new development at the expense of “inner city” areas. As growth continues on the periphery, support development ( jobs, shopping, and entertainment) tends to locate there further reinforcing peripheral rather than internal locations as the choice locations for new real estate investment.

As a result, internal locations, except perhaps for the downtown and adjacent areas which have a character and attractiveness unique to the region, lose population, see disinvestment and become a location which is the only affordable choice for poorer populations. The combination of poor population and older public and private infrastructure results in the inability to maintain the quality of the inner city environment. Thus, a centrifugal force develops which empties the inner city of investment, quality housing and related services and spins such investment towards the urban fringe.
This is more than the oft decried impact of “sprawl”. It’s sprawl plus abandonment. The challenge to cities which are witnessing a shrinking center and growing periphery is to find ways to reduce outward expansion and encourage concentration and redevelopment.

How do we do this? How do we encourage reinvestment within the city such that the periphery and immediate downtown area are no longer the only market alternatives for new development? This is not an easy question, nor is it a popular course of action given all sorts of commitments to peripheral investment.

All cities suffer to some degree from this phenomenon. In some, the market economy is strong enough to facilitate older neighborhood rehab, often through public private partnerships. Chicago is one example where LISC has partnered with numerous inner city CDC’s to support neighborhood redevelopment through its Quality of Life Planning program.

Youngstown, Ohio, addressed this issue in another way, determining that some of its prior inner city areas should become open space. Decatur, IL is discussing another approach which seeks to reduce the trend of outward development and redirect investment toward the city center and inner city neighborhoods. Elements of the evolving Camiros assisted City-County plan include industrial, educational and tourism policies to enhance investment in the center of Decatur and its neighborhoods rather than along an ever increasing periphery.

The challenge for Decatur, and other cities witnessing a shrinking center and growing fringe, is to finding workable strategies to reduce outward expansion and encourage concentration and redevelopment. This requires four broad courses of action:

1. A commitment to revitalizing central city neighborhoods as a resource for new investment for the upper and middle income families while maintaining an appropriate supply of affordable alternatives.
2. A focus on transportation improvements that encourage concentrated, centralized development, rather than suburban, dispersed development.
3. Public and private investments and actions to assemble and develop in-city contemporary sized residential, commercial and industrial land parcels attractive to new development.
4. Strong and committed public and private leadership to encourage central city economic sustainability and to redirect cultural forces that are primarily oriented to outward expansion back toward the city center.

Camiros worked with CDC's in 14 Chicago neighborhoods to prepare plans to strengthen and rebuild their neighborhoods through the LISC NCP planning process. This is one way to counter shrinking city syndrome

In the end, the proper response to a shrinking city condition is to encourage reinvestment within the urban core such that the periphery is no longer the only alternative for new growth and development. It is about creating a viable choice for those who have the economic wherewithal to make such choices and assuring access to jobs, quality retail goods and public services for those whose location choices are limited by the economics of their situation.

Over time the cost saving of this sustainable urban development approach are sizeable. Social cost savings will be found in the l improvement of key facilities and systems such as the city school and park systems which meet the expectations of an upwardly mobile population. Environmental costs will be reduced as less raw, greenfield land is converted to subdivisions and shopping malls; runoff and drainage problems as well as traffic will be minimized. Economic costs will be reduced by the elimination of redundant facilities and infrastructure needed to serve a geographically spread-out population, and the reduced travel times and distances inherent in the creation of a more concentrated form of urban development.

Some might argue that Americans, especially the citizens of our smaller cities, have no interest in central city living. After all, the American ideal has always been the single family home on an individual plot of ground. Concentrated development does not conflict with this ideal, it merely argues that housing should not occur as piecemeal development on “available” greenfield sites. While these sites might initially appear to be located in the “country”, they are really just the first actions in building numerous unrelated subdivisions which over time grow into each other in a manner which is neither country nor city.

New green roof in Chicago (Source: City of Chicago)

What goes around comes around! Sustainable concepts such as green roofs aren’t necessarily new. Many have been forgotten during our embrace of technology, only to be rediscovered as our needs and values change.

It seems that “sustainability” is in the air. Every planning and design article argues for sustainability. Every plan that we draft or read includes sustainable actions. Sustainability is important. But how do we go about making city development sustainable? We suggest that sustainable development is the way we manage our policies and our regulations to improve the quality of human life so as to live within the carrying capacity of our environmental systems.

Ethically, urban planning and development policy has always been concerned with sustainability. What planner thinks of their work as purposefully depleting or permanently damaging natural and human resources? What planning professional or civic leader purposefully supports a pattern of sprawling urban development? But if these concerns remain only a policy, it is difficult to assure that sustainable objectives can be achieved. To do so we need to look to regulation, and no one set of regulations offers more potential to positively address sustainability than the zoning ordinance.

Old green roof in Romania (© istockphoto.com/Romulus Hossn)

The assessment of a zoning ordinance for sustainability policies is a complex endeavor. We are all familiar with the notion of unanticipated consequences, and nowhere does it play out as completely as in zoning. A change in one regulation may inadvertently affect another. For example, in order to accommodate parking we tend to excessively pave areas resulting in increased runoff. We limit the types of accessory uses permitted on a lot, which often restricts the use of renewable energy devices and technologies. We do not include flexibility in ordinance regulations that would allow for adaptive reuse of existing structures. These requirements were not established to purposefully conflict with sustainability goals, but they resulted from trying to meet specific community goals. However, creating sustainable, energy efficient places requires us to test the impact of commonly held assumptions to be sure that our plans and ordinances do not produce such unanticipated consequences.

To that end, sustainable development policy, and the resulting regulation, needs to comprehensively address all quality of life issues within an ordinance. And, sustainable development regulations need to reach beyond direct environmental impacts to consider how land use regulation:

• Accommodates alternative energy sources
• Increases walkability, encourages biking and fosters choice in transportation
• Provides public transit linkages
• Allows for and incentivizes green building techniques
• Incorporates sustainable landscaping and stormwater management
• Protects natural resources

One way to make this assessment is to undertake a “sustainability audit” of the development regulations. The audit reviews all of the community’s ordinances and assesses the roadblocks and omissions to renewable energy and broader issues of sustainability by uncovering those regulations that can be labeled “unsustainable.” The ordinance is reviewed through the lens of sustainability, and a series of potential revisions and additions is compiled. Once the audit is complete, one can suggest how to best tackle the issues identified through changes in regulation or in broader community policy.

The core of the audit process is a broad review of the ordinance to assess how regulations should allow for and encourage a variety of sustainable and green development techniques, improve opportunities for renewable energy, and take advantage of existing resources. This can range from large-scale development concepts like traditional neighborhood development and conservation design to regulations and permissions for site-specific elements like solar panels, wind turbines and the use of pervious pavers. Sustainable ordinances should:

1. Reduce barriers to sustainable development
2. Create incentives for new development, as well as flexibilities for the retrofitting of existing development, to incorporate sustainable design and technologies
3. Set standards for these techniques that make permissions clear and address potential impacts
4. Measure and quantify the results of implementation over time

More specifically, a sustainability audit focuses on the following areas:

1. Permitted accessory structures, including alternative energy technologies
2. Emerging “green” principal uses
3. Permitted densities
4. Sustainable development techniques, both small-scale and large-scale
5. Adaptive reuse and retrofitting of existing structures
6. Incorporating green building techniques, including incentives for their use and monitor their efficiency
7. Landscaping and stormwater management

For many of us, zoning means protecting the quality of life for residents and minimizing the adverse impacts of one property upon another. The original intent of zoning was, in part to do just that. Times have changed since zoning was first introduced in the early years of the 20th Century. Yet we seem to be stuck focusing on the techniques of zoning, rather than working to achieve better ends through development regulations.

Lately, the vogue has been to focus on the form-giving elements of zoning. But not everyone finds this approach favorable. Some planners are cautious about form-based zoning because they see it as too doctrinaire, too formulaic, too complex, or too dependent upon the designer’s interpretation of generally stated values. Other planners are contemptuous of what is often called Euclidian zoning because it has resulted in land use separation that, in hindsight, they now see as undesirable.

Looking Beyond Zoning’s Limitations
There is a move toward refocusing zoning as a community response to the broader planning vision. Zoning has evolved to include a mix of use-based, performance and form-based zoning in a manner that directly links land use, urban design and quality of life policies. But, why are we doing this, and where are we headed?

Underlying such thinking is the goal of building desirable and sustainable places where people find comfort in the settings we create and find those settings efficient to build, manage, and maintain. A sense of place is more than the form of the place; it is the function and level of activity that occurs there. Whether intended or not, the act of zoning can help to create or destroy the physical aspects of one’s sense of place, because it is through zoning that a city regulates the way these placemaking elements come together. Consider the types of places found in any town: a town center, a neighborhood, a commercial highway, an industrial park. Thoughtful use of zoning can help to establish the character of each of these areas to reflect the scale of development, pattern of property ownership, function and modes of travel. But to do that, one must understand the type of environment to be created.

Placemaking reinforces those aspects of a neighborhood or district that make it distinctive and functionally unique. Thus, placemaking must incorporate the identity of an area, its cultural values, uses, levels of activities and physical scale and forms, into the pattern of development within that area.

Zoning Is Only As Good As The Quality Of The Vision
We should not lose sight of the fact that zoning is a purpose driven activity. Zoning as placemaking cannot be completed in a vacuum. Rather, it must be preceded by clear policy directions established by a community plan that is tempered by a clear understanding of the community values and development realities that affect the kind of places to be created. There are three sustainability principles which are critical to the development of place-based zoning in a community.

1. To support social systems within the community which embrace shared values by:

• providing a transparent and equitable process of planning and change,
• maximizing social interaction within the cultural context, and
• protecting and enhancing community quality of life.

2. To support economic systems within the community which provide resilience by:

• integrating changing market needs into flexible development forms,
• providing a diversity of economic opportunities consistent with the market, and
• meeting local needs by using local resources efficiently.

3. To support environmental systems which support green infrastructure by:

• minimizing its impact on current and future environmental resources,
• minimizing land and transportation requirements, and
• maximizing the integration of the underlying ecology.

All of these factors must inform the zoning process. A proper combination results in a desirable, functional and comfortable environment for work, home or play. The key is that a city’s development policy must be clear enough to provide a basis for such zoning. In essence, the identification of the desired place characteristics should emanate from the community’s planning policies and related strategies.

Work now in progress in New Orleans illustrates this relationship. At present, the City is preparing a new Master Plan intended to inform the structure of a new zoning ordinance. We believe that the hinge between these two elements is defining the community’s neighborhoods and districts in terms of their place-making characteristics. The degree to which the plan identifies different characteristics of the residential neighborhoods and commercial districts will provide the basis for the use, form and performance criteria used to implement the character of each district. In this manner, zoning serves to implement a broad base of plan and design policies. It is more than creating regulations to limit adverse impacts; it is creating regulations to attain a desired pattern of development, which will help to provide the quality of life desired by the community’s residents and businesses.