Smart code debuts in American Graffiti’s hometown

Barring unforeseen events, Petaluma, California, on July 16 will become the first municipality in the US to adopt the SmartCode. The 55,000-population city in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, sees the new code as its best route for regulating development in a 400-acre, mostly industrial, partly greenfield area in the community’s center. For six years, citizens and officials tried with great difficulty to reach consensus on a system that would guide development in central Petaluma. Consultant Paul Crawford of Crawford Multari & Clark Associates devised a code, but the community had trouble understanding it and was not sure it would result in the kind of development that people wanted, says Laura Hall of Fisher & Hall Urban Design in Santa Rosa. So last fall, Crawford brought in Fisher & Hall, which proposed using the SmartCode developed by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. Hall says a citizens committee working on the issue liked the SmartCode because it offered “simple language, lots of visuals, and the clarity of seeing something coded block by block. In an instant, you can look at the map and see what you’re getting.” Fisher & Hall collaborated with Crawford and other consultants on fine-tuning the SmartCode to central Petaluma’s needs and allocating the 400 acres to Transect categories T6 (urban core), T5 (urban center), and T4 (general urban). The T6 area is designated for four-story development — or up to six stories if the city’s design review committee believes a proposal is of high quality and is in the right location. T5 and T4 are less intense. Because the SmartCode is a copyrighted legal document, any municipality or entity using it must pay a fee. By contrast, the urban Transect itself is “a framework for planning and zoning that is in the public domain,” says Joel Russell, a planning consultant in Northampton, Massachusetts, who helped establish a Transect-based zoning plan for portions of Saratoga Springs, New York. The Upstate New York city “took the Transect and some of the basic ideas found in SmartCode and adapted them to fit within the existing framework of the Saratoga Springs zoning ordinance,” Russell says. He notes that “Andres Duany has said on several occasions that the SmartCode is one of many ways to codify the Transect.” In California, the “Central Petaluma SmartCode” refined by Fisher & Hall will help a growing community achieve the results it wants in a 40-acre greenfield area and in a larger old area containing what Hall describes as a mix of “historic buildings, dilapidated warehouses, surface parking lots, vacant parcels, and a few blocks of bungalows.” Petaluma is expanding its downtown, and has “absolutely wonderful, walkable blocks” in its center, according to Hall. Basin Street Properties of Petaluma has options on at least six blocks in the core and has expressed enthusiasm for the SmartCode, she says. The code passed its final reading June 16 and is to take effect July 16. Subconsultants were David Sargent and Robert Alminana of Sargent Town Planning for town planning and architecture, Patrick Siegman of Nelson/Nygaard Consulting Associates for parking, and Peter Musty of CharretteCenter.com for illustrations. For its size, Petaluma is a prominent place, having been used for the filming of many movies, including American Graffiti, Tucker, and Peggy Sue Got Married, not to mention “Morning in America” commercials for President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign. “Petaluma was the first city in the US to do growth management, and it went all the way to the Supreme Court,” where the municipality’s approach to growth was upheld, Hall says. The result of growth management, she says, was that “they got slow sprawl instead of fast sprawl.” The latest effort, it’s hoped, will produce more beneficial results.