Planning and Urban Design Standards

By the American Planning Association

John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006, 736 pp., hardcover $199.

Wiley has come out with a book modeled on its perennial hit Architectural Graphic Standards that is likely to become a fixture on the bookshelves of planners and professionals in related fields. Planning and Urban Design Standards, an oversized volume of more than 700 pages, is not quite unprecedented, but it will serve an important role that no other book is likely to fill. The American Planning Association did the compilation and editing of materials, which adds to the book’s authoritative air (Architectural Graphic Standards is edited by the American Institute of Architects).

Among recent books, Planning and Urban Design Standards can be compared most closely to Time-Saver Standards for Urban Design, published in 2003 and edited by Donald Watson, Alan Plattus, and Robert Shibley. Both are hefty tomes covering some of the same ground and containing substantial contributions from new urbanists. Time-Saver Standards is more theoretical and geared to urban design, while Planning and Urban Design Standards is more practical and geared to planning in general.

There is certainly much material in Planning and Urban Design Standards that would appeal to a wide range of practitioners, including urban designers, architects, landscape architects, developers, and engineers. Yet the book also goes into amazing and useful detail on subjects that professional — particularly municipal — planners deal with on a regular basis. These include step-by-step instructions on how to write just about any kind of land-use plan, as well as detailed graphics and text on subjects such as signage, wastewater, water treatment, solid waste, lighting, floodplains, disaster planning, and public meetings. Many of the subjects in this book have less to do with urbanism per se than with environmental and resource planning and infrastructure.

But a lot of material in this book does relate directly to urbanism. The street design section, provided by new urbanist transportation engineers Walter Kulash and Peter Swift, looks particularly good. Sections on specialty retail districts, commercial corridors, and downtown planning are all supportive of New Urbanism principles. The section on residential types, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, clearly emphasizes an urban block and street pattern. The transit-oriented development section, by David Dixon of Goody Clancy & Associates, is very good.

As comprehensive and well-put-together as Planning and Urban Design Standards is, there are weaknesses. Pedestrian-oriented workplace districts get little attention, for example. Office parks and warehouses are shown in a highly suburban pattern, not connected to a block and street network. The section on form-based codes and other new urbanist regulatory tools is brief — taking up only a page and a half — and not very detailed. The book states: “American communities are in the middle of an extraordinary era of regulatory reform, unmatched since the advent of zoning in the 1920s.” If so, why such a brief overview on innovative techniques? The urban-rural Transect is hardly mentioned at all. The definitions and illustrations of open-space types such as plazas, squares, and greens could be improved.

Perhaps those elements will be added to the next edition. In the meantime, Planning and Urban Design Standards contains more than enough useful material to make this a valuable addition to the library of any practitioner in a field that involves land use.