Shaping the region

Chapter 2 of the New Urbanism Best Practices Guide

Regional or large-scale plans incorporating New Urbanism’s principles have been written to guide development in many places across the US. Examples in this chapter include the Chicago Regional Plan, Envision Utah, Portland 2040 (in Oregon), and the Community Character Plan of Collier County, Florida. Such plans generally uphold the idea that the modern metropolis has multiple centers, should contain identifiable cities, towns, and villages, and should make the neighborhood its basic unit of growth.

Mapping of preserves, wildlife corridors, and essential agricultural land is often the first order of business. Techniques in this chapter include Oregon’s urban growth boundaries to protect open space and agricultural or wooded land and the division of Sarasota County, Florida, into six “resource management areas,” including a spine of greenways and a villages/open space area, where the bulk of the land is preserved and new development is concentrated in compact communities.

Land use should be linked to transportation. Acting on that premise is complicated by the fact that in most regions, land use is controlled locally, while transportation investments usually are decided at the state or federal level. In major metropolitan areas, the transportation-land use connection may be emphasized by encouraging denser development around transit hubs. A recurring challenge is how to create an urban street and road network that accommodates through-traffic of cars and trucks, yet is comfortable for pedestrians. Form-based codes, including the SmartCode, are useful tools in regional planning. The Mississippi Renewal Forum used diagrams of the five-minute walk to show how neighborhood structure could be reinforced. A tool called TransectMap helps governments in the Portland region map Transect zones and implement Transect-based codes.