Planning Forward

• Author: Robert N. Lane
• Profession: Senior Fellow for Urban Design, Regional Plan Association
• Pages: 21-23

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Planning Forward

RobertN. Lane

Senior Fellow for Urban Design, Regional Plan Association

October 2006: In Goshen, Orange County, New York, about 120 people

gather for Redesigning the Edgeless City, a training and planning session

sponsored by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and facilitated by Regional

Plan Association (RPA) and the Pace University Law School Land Use

Law Center (LULC). In the room are professional planners, academics,

agency sta, not-for-prot organizations, and —most signicantly—about

80 citizen planners from 10 municipalities, the people who serve on local

planning, zoning boards, and commissions.

During the day, the participants move between lectures on topics rang-

ing from green infrastructure to commercial corridor redesign and small

group working sessions. Working side-by-side with their urban design and

planning facilitators, participants allocate projected growth, rst across the

entire mid-county landscape, and then within each of their municipalities,

drawing with markers and tracing over base maps and aerial photographs.

Simultaneously, participants rotate into working sessions on the relation-

ship between design and land use law.

In the months that follow, RPA conducts follow-up sessions with indi-

vidual municipalities to review more detailed town planning designs and

to review a detailed audit of their existing land use regulations to under-

stand what strategic changes they might consider to achieve their goals. e

LULC recruits local land use leaders from these communities and goes on

to train them to develop strategies to balance development and conservation

of their landscapes.

What do these events tell us about the state of town planning at the begin-

ning of the 21st century?

A new set of challenges—from income polarization to climate change—

confront planners, land use lawyers, urban designers, environmental advo-

cates, and the many citizen stakeholders who work to improve the quality

of life in their communities. Many of these problems may not at rst seem

to be fundamentally problems of land use law and design. And yet they are

all inextricably linked to regulation and development. For example, income

polarization is aected by land use patterns that may limit or expand access