Memorandum

City of Lawrence

Planning Department

TO:	David L. Corliss
FROM:	Dan Warner
CC:	Debbie Van Saun
Date:	5/5/06
RE:	Form-Based Codes Institute Training

I recently attended a training session in Chicago on Form-Based Codes.  The Form-Based Codes Institute provided the training and this was course 101: An Introductory Course.  The Form-Based Codes Institute was formed in early October 2004 at a meeting convened at the Driehaus Estate in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.  Leading practitioners in the disciplines of urban design, planning, architecture, public policy, and law met to consider various aspects of this emerging regulatory technique.  The purpose of my attendance at this training course was to gain more knowledge of Form-Based Codes to assist with my staffing of the Community Design Committee.

Why Form-Based Codes?  The rest of this paragraph is pulled from the course materials and I have supplied the emphasis at the end.  Conventional zoning, as a whole, has produced undesirable urban sprawl, forcing an unsustainable way of life and consumption of resources.  This has caused a convergence of various practitioners to reexamine our communities and ways-of-life and figure out how to grow ourselves out of the problem.  Older cities, towns, villages, and hamlets serve as great models, showing how planning was done when resources and mobility we take for granted were expensive and in short supply. Studying the three-dimensional form and human scale of these older communities is the basis for new regulations, hence the term, Form-Based coding.

Among the top practitioners teaching the Chicago course were Victor Dover, Paul Crawford, Peter Katz, Bill Spikowski, and Sam Poole.  The course included a review of the differences between current codes and form-based codes.  Sam Poole gave an introduction to the legal issues with graphic and form-based codes.  Paul Crawford, Victor Dover, and Bill Spikowski gave presentations on a few case studies.  These covered versions of Form-Based Codes in Downtown Kendall (Miami, FL. area), Pulelehua (Maui, Hawaii), Fort Myers Beach, and Cotati, California. 

An interesting field exercise had our group out and about in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago.  Our task was to learn how to determine the DNA of the neighborhood by observing and documenting existing conditions using Form-Based Code techniques.  It is the DNA of a community that ultimately forms the new Form-Based Code.

The course was well attended and included a cross-section of practitioners from around the country.  You can find additional information about Form-Based Codes at http://www.formbasedcodes.org/