The city I recently worked for just finished updating its comprehensive plan. The update is a major overhaul that is required by the state of Florida once every 7-10 years. We used this opportunity to transition from “growth management” strategies to long-term sustainability. This is a significant shift in focus, on which the city can build until the next update. Here are the strategies and introductory text, along with a symbol I created to illustrate the inter-relationship between the different components.
Sustainability Strategies
The strategies of the past 20 years have served the City well in realizing its vision of becoming a progressive, high-quality community. For the next 20 years, a new vision is needed to ensure that the City’s quality can be maintained; so that it can continue to build on its success. Twenty years from now, Port Orange will become a city that is able to meet its needs in the present without compromising its ability to meet those needs in the future. This is the vision of sustainability.
The sustainable city will be one that draws together the various uses that are necessary for it to function. It will be knitted together by an urban fabric that is designed around the needs and scale of people. It will be a “lifelong” community that allows its residents to meet their needs at all ages and stages of their lives. It will be a city in which its citizens have choices in how far to travel to get what they need and the mode they choose to get there. It will enable people to drive less and reduce the amount of greenhouse gases their cars produce. It will use less energy and resources while supporting a greater number of people, and will produce a portion of its own energy and food supply. It will be a city of unique places and spaces. It will be a place designed for human interaction – the cultural amenity great cities offer their residents known as “civic life.”
The community will shift focus from growth to sustainability. Realizing the vision of sustainability will take a continued effort over the next 20 years to achieve. The City will employ the strategies listed below, which are organized into five categories that form the foundation of the sustainable city: land use, mobility, people, energy, and the environment.
Land Use
- Allow the integration rather than separation of most uses to bring people closer to their destinations and reduce the distance they must travel.
- Increase the supply of non-residential land and square footage for shopping, services, and employment in existing and new commercial nodes.
- Design new centers and retrofit existing ones according to urban design principles that accommodate the needs and scale of people.
- Provide incentives and remove regulatory barriers to guide new growth to areas where it is appropriate and reinvestment to where it is necessary, particularly in older areas of the City and infill parcels. Make infill development more competitive than “greenfield” development on the city’s edge.
- Encourage small-scale agricultural uses to provide a portion of the local food supply. Protect bonafide agricultural uses outside the city. Encourage/remove barriers to local food production and community gardens.
Mobility
- Design future transportation improvements to increase mobility, access, and choice.
- Enhance the City’s “complete streets” to better accommodate the travel modes used by people of all ages and needs. Provide the amenities and infrastructure necessary to make those modes useful, comfortable and convenient to the general population.
- Guide density and intensity into mixed-use centers along designated transit corridors to increase ridership.
- In appropriate areas, reduce parking requirements that push buildings apart and make other modes much less convenient.
- Utilize urban design principles appropriate to each part of the City that make the best use of available travel modes, corridors, and opportunities.
- Increase connectivity between places to reduce travel distance and make walking and cycling more convenient.
People
- Increase the City’s jobs/housing balance by 2020 so that more residents do not have to travel to another city for meaningful employment.
- Embrace “place-making” as a design principle in new development and redevelopment. Create distinct places built around the concept of shared space that allow residents of the city to gather as a community at a variety of scales, in the form of plazas, squares, sidewalks, cafes, and porches.
- Allow residential areas to include the variety of housing types needed by people at all stages in their lives, including children, adults, parent, “empty-nesters,” active retirees, and seniors.
- Design civic buildings, parks, and the public realm so that they add character, build value, promote security, support cultural activities, and help residents feel proud of their community.
- Provide more opportunities for healthy, active living in which people are able to walk or bike to where they want to go for errands or recreation, and where they have access to fresh, locally produced food.
Energy
- Enable and encourage home and business owners to achieve greater energy independence by removing regulatory barriers, providing incentives, and creating guidelines to maximize the use and efficiency of private renewable energy systems.
- Steadily increase the amount of energy the City government generates for its own needs from renewable sources, and decrease the amount of energy it uses overall.
- Strive wherever possible to reduce the City’s contribution to global climate change by “growing cooler” – reducing greenhouse gas emissions, becoming “carbon neutral,” and using heat-reflective surfaces and materials wherever possible.
- Employ methods to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMTs) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in location and investment decisions for public facilities.
- Promote energy conservation techniques that incorporate Federal Energy Star Standards, as consistent with the requirements of the Florida Building Code.
Environment
- Create, protect and manage systems of green infrastructure (e.g., urban forests, parks and open spaces, green roofs, shorelines, natural drainage systems).
- Continue to protect floodplains, wetland and stream corridors, critical wildlife habitat, and other environmentally sensitive ecosystems.
- Minimize property damage caused by hurricanes and repeated flooding by building in appropriate areas and removing or raising structures from low-lying areas.
- Provide incentives to create new usable, useful open space, such as allowing community gardens and green roofs to count toward the required open space on any development site.
- Steadily reduce the amount of water used city-wide through conservation, greater efficiency, and Florida-friendly landscaping. Increase the percentage of water used from renewable sources such as rainfall and stormwater runoff.
Michael Disher 