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One of the debates that has been raging for years in planning circles is whether or not zoning codes are actually of any use or not. I think they are important, but only as a reflection of the state of development culture within a city. Many cities have great policies in place which promptly are amended to accommodate the first project that challenges it. In that sense, zoning is probably not all that further ahead than the state of planning in a city at most times.

We're pretty far behind in Toronto.

Don't get me wrong: I think Toronto is generally a well-planned city, at least compared to most of its counterparts. It has successfully preserved large areas of the city in its distinctive 19th Century form, maintained a streetcar fleet that few other North American cities could parallel, and has a lively downtown.

However, it is an undeniably ugly city. The 19th Century parts of it tend towards the austere, and the 20th Century parts towards the bland. The trend so far is that the 21st Century projects are leaning towards the garish (Liebskind and Gehry have come to town).

This is largely due to two factors. The first factor is that the city historically has not paid a lot of attention to urban design issues. This is evident when looking at much of the "Central Business District" - an area separate from downtown and distinguished my monstrously high buildings that create lovely wind tunnels in the winter. This is Canada. We do not need more cold wind from October through March, thank you for asking.

The second issue is that cities still do not have the capacity to actually enforce any urban design standards. While an adroit planning department can figure out how to accomplish some of their urban design goals through negotiation, at the end of the day, they are left at the mercy of developers. Not that every planner is a bad guy, but a lot of them are.

In contrast, Chicago's zoning ordinance appears to contain some interesting provisions that would be useful in most cities. For example, residential zoning also has a "Character Standards" section that specifies that "To avoid the appearance of blank walls and ensure "eyes on the street," windows and/or main entrance doors must comprise at least 17.5% of the area of each building facade that faces a street." There's nothing terribly profound about this as a design feature. However, many developers do not grasp the importance of features like eyes on the street from a design perspective. In my own experience, I have attended meetings with developers as a planner, and it is not all that uncommon in some municipalities to find developers who regularly submit drawings where streets are faced with blanks walls. What's even more alarming is that many cities approve them.

Will changing our zoning ordinances bring practices likes this to a sudden halt? Not likely. We've neglected so many of the basics of good community planning for so long that it will take time to recover all those practices. However, when the time comes, it wouldn't hurt to write some of this down in places like the zoning ordinance to make sure that it becomes entrenched in our practice.