the first to adopt a form-based code citywide. “It is about
the intentional making of the public realm.”
“Use-based zoning was concerned with preventing bad
things from happening,” said Tony Perez, director of
form-based coding at Opticos Design. “It wasn’t about
generating outcomes but telling us what we can’t do.”
Form-based codes first emerged in the modern era as a way
to guide large, master-planned developments. The classic
early example is DPZ’s 1983 code for Seaside, Fla.,
(though the term “form-based codes” wouldn’t take hold
till about 2001.) But since the recession, “municipalities
have come to understand they are important for sparking
and guiding redevelopment, particularly of town centers,”
said Marta Goldsmith, executive director of the Form-Based Codes Institute (FBCI). “It’s no longer news that a
growing segment of the population wants to live and work
in walkable, mixed-use, diverse places, and the market has
shown that they are high-value communities. Developers
want to build them, many communities want them, but
conventional zoning prohibits them.”
A growing segment of the population wants to live
and work in walkable, mixed-use, diverse places.
Spurring redevelopment
Until recently, nearly all form-based codes were a permissive overlay on traditional zoning, said Geoff Ferrell,
partner in the code-writing firm Ferrell Madden. Where a
conventional code might call for buildings to be set back
from the street, often behind a parking lot, and would
prohibit apartments over shops, say, the form-based code
might actually encourage them. With a market looking
to build just that sort of mixed-use project, areas that
built up with now-discarded office parks and strip centers
have found themselves “stuck in a development version
of gridlock,” Ferrell said. “Applying a form-based code
to make it easy to develop what you actually want is like
releasing a logjam sometimes.”
That is exactly what happened for the Columbia Pike Corridor in Arlington County, Va., a next-door neighbor to
Washington, D.C. By all accounts, Columbia Pike’s 2003
code reboot was the first time local government applied a
form-based code to an area with multiple property owners, as opposed to being used to guide a master-planned
development. The corridor, in south Arlington, “
developed as a classic suburban strip, with garden apartments,
drive-through restaurants, car dealers and gas stations,”
said Chris Zimmerman, who served on the Arlington
County Board from 1996 to 2014. “In the 1990s and
early 2000s, we had a strong regional economy and
Arlington was getting a lot of development, but it was
nearly all along two Metro rail lines.” Columbia Pike,
meanwhile, was lying fallow. “The community wanted
the corridor to be more like a Main Street and serve the
residents more. It was flanked by neighborhoods that
were basically walkable, but the main thoroughfare was
not at all.”
The question, Zimmerman said, was “How do you turn
parking lots into something that is more urban? Nobody
is walking in the door asking to go through a lot of trouble to redevelop these places, and the underlying zoning
precluded it.”
In 2002, the county hired the urban design firm Dover-Kohl and code writer Ferrell to work with the community
in developing a vision and a guide for producing it. Key
elements were to encourage housing over first-floor retail,
to preserve some historic sites and to meet the parking
Courtesy of Arlington County
Courtesy of Visit Denver
(Above) Columbia Pike
in Arlington County, Va.
