From the SmartCode:
The SmartCode written by Andres Duany and calibrated and adopted by the City of Sarasota through the Master Planning process incorporates Smart Growth and New Urbanism principles, Transect-based planning, environmental and zoning regulations, and regional, community and building-scaled design provisions.
The principles of Smart Growth and New Urbanism support communities that are town-centered and transit and pedestrian-oriented, with a mix of housing, commercial and retail uses, while preserving open lands and achieving other environmental goals. New Urbanism was born in the early 1980's with the design of the groundbreaking new traditional town of Seaside, Florida. Since then, planning has progressed on over 900 New Urbanist communities across the continent.
Many of the most-loved traditional towns of North America were deliberately and thoughtfully planned. However, in our time, over the past sixty years, places have evolved in a completely different form. They have spread loosely along highways and haphazardly across one-open country, enabled by the widespread ownership of automobiles, cheap petroleum, and generalized wealth. Standards in favor of the automobile over the pedestrian. These practices have created strip shopping, big box stores with enormous parking lots, and sadly gutted downtowns. This movement has made walking or cycling beyond one's own cul-de-sac dangerous or even impossible. There has been simultaneous destruction of both towns and open space - the 20th Century phenomenon known as sprawl. The form of our built environment needs a 21st Century correction.
The SmartCode was created to attack this problem at the point of decisive impact - the intersection of law and design. It is a form-based code, meaning it envisions and encourages a certain physical outcome - the form of region, community, block, and/or building. This form is compact, walkable, and mixed-use, and it is meant to be comfortable, safe, and ecologically sustainable. It allows a mix of uses within the neighborhood, so its residents don't have to drive everywhere.
The operating principle of Transect is that certain forms belong in certain environments; for example, an apartment building belongs in a more urban setting, and a ranch house belongs in a more rural setting.
Denise Kowal, President of the Burns Square Property Owners Association is one of only two people in Sarasota who are professionally trained in the SmartCode.
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