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requirements. Net result: big distances, auto dependence, vast road networks, and dull cookie-cutter places. So what's the nature of form-based codes, the substitute now being pushed by advocates of richer mixed-use developments? Peter Katz, founder and former director of the Congress for the New Urbanism, reeled off the claimed benefits at the Chicago meeting. The new codes, he says,focus less on what's forbidden and more on what's desired--the kind of town or city that people indicate they want. Mixed use is welcomed back. Basic rules are specified--for example a range of acceptable building types from apartments and townhouses to detached villas or high-rise towers (leaving individual design,for the most part, to owners). There are regulations, but fairly modest ones: typically the new codes specify minimum and maximum height, avoiding blank walls, and especially building out to the sidewalks to create a sense of place. Underlying the codes, says Katz, each area needs a vision or plan--a community design, if you will--so that private building decisions more easily harmonize with and add excellence to the public realm we've so neglected in recent decades, especially our communities'streetscapes, squares and public buildings. Let the form-based codes, he suggests, be simple and straighffiorward, backed up by easily accessible, computer-based graphics, and avoid the legalisms and obscurities typical of so much zoning. There are barriers: Only a handful of town planning firms are adept with the new codes-- nearly all with some connection to the Miami-based firm of Duany Plater-2yberk which "invented"the technique with its 1982 plan for Seaside, Fla. And of those firms, even fewer have conducted the "charrettes" of week-long community meetings to focus on redesign of individual neighborhoods or commercial centers and gauge public choices from real alternatives. Such meetings (which Seattle planner Mark Hinshaw would call 'public workshops') establish the vision on which local codes can than be fashioned. What's against form-based codes is that they're new and disturbing to many developers, politicians and homeowners afraid of any change. And they aren't familiar (and thus reassuring) to big lenders. At worst, University of Pennsylvania land use expert Jonathan Barnett told the Chicago gathering, introducing form-based codes says to politicos: "Let's anticipate every land use fight we could have in the next 20 years, and have it now." Most likely, the new codes will make their mark first for individual projects and only go citywide or countywide later. Pequot Lakes Staff Report 6(a)-5 December 11,2008