CNU-Comprehensive Plan-Installment 3

Nashville has spent the last ten years fundamentally changing its approach to planning from one based on conventional zoning for uses to one that codes for character. Last year, city staff and community and civic leaders went to Nashville to see what that city is doing and what are the results. It is nothing short of amazing. To see some of the work and the projects go to the Nashville Planning Department's web site.

Jennifer Carlat-Nashville Planning Department
Building Support for Form-Based Comprehensive Plans

Nashville's Community Planning Staff includes a transportation planner and a design studio. The department goes outside for market research and analysis. The staff in Nashville's Planning Department numbers around 18. Their work is among the best in the field.

Premise:
"Any attempt to develop with an emphasis on character and form will always be compromised if the community does not plan for character and form."

Nashville is phasing out land use plans and replacing them with community character plans. The challenge is that the staff must train the community, elected officials, planning commissioners and staff itself to know and recognize character and form. It is a major cultural change!

It has taken ten years of education to produce this major change in Nashville's approach.

Four Basic Tenets

Education and Cultural Change
Basics of Community Planning-What makes the Complete Community?

• Employment and services proximate to housing
• Housing choices
• Transportation choices
• Recreation Choices
  

Tool: Nashville Neighborhood Guidebook (Scroll down on the web page to find it.) It is a powerful educational tool that helps people develop a sense of form and character.

Form and Character Matter
There has been an evolution of zoning tools.

Nashville uses an Urban Design Overlay (UDO) to regulate form not use. It can be publicly or privately initiated. It can be for greenfield or in-fill development. It is flexible.
An example of a successful UDO is West End Park. It had RM-20 zoning. They did a UDO. Since the UDO's adoption 21 new buildings have gone up. The UDO showed the area could have higher density as long as there was clear guidance on form and character. The East Nashville Community Plan is another example.

Form and Character Can Vary
Use of the transect methodology as a tool to help understand and categorize the environment encourages diversity of development, not homogeniety. They developed the Nashville/Davidson County Transect. For neighborhoods the transect category determined during the planning process. Existing zoning is a one size fits all approach that ignores form and character. Form based- codes are replacing it.

Community Character Manual-policies will be applied to all plans as updates occur.

Regionalism and Sustainability
Integrating transportation and land use
For neighborhoods with major transportation corridors, the key question to answer is: Are you a drive through or a destination? the built form changes depending on the answer.