The Maine PlaceCode is an open source library of zoning tools intended to help rural areas, villages, towns, and cities create the places they want, based on the best-loved places they already have. It is a set of instructions written in clear language , which emphasize the physical form of buildings and building groupings, and how buildings relate to the natural environment.
Many communities in Maine want to update their zoning but lack the capacity, staffing, resources, funding, and tools to help them with this effort. There has also been a lack of good approaches tailored to rural communities. The PlaceCode is the result of a targeted effort by Maine planners, economic developers, municipal officials and others to create a flexible and easy to use playbook that works for rural and urban communities across Maine who want to proactively plan for their future.
The PlaceCode provides standards that are actual, legal tools: not design guidelines, or vague recommendations that can cause confusion and are difficult to administer. A jurisdiction adopts these standards just as it would adopt conventional use-based Euclidean zoning. Unlike Euclidean zoning, which is focused on dictating uses and activities inside a building or on a parcel, and what NOT to do, the Maine PlaceCode is focused on the full range of components that produce our built environment, and communicates what the community DOES want. It allows us to be sure that the place we build is a good place for people, which after all is the entire point of planning: making places that work for people.
A form-based code allows us to create traditional neighborhoods, downtowns, villages, and hamlets where people have a range of choices for where and how they live, while maintaining the look and feel of the community, as defined locally by the community.
The PlaceCode is constructed as a series of nesting standards which address all areas of land use planning. Each section has a statement of purpose and a statement of applicability. The PlaceCode also contains a list of additional standards that may be relevant to a community for governing land use, development patterns, building types, and other components of the built environment.
The Place Code was created to give communities and head start at updating their out-of-date zoning. This library of standards has been created and vetted over a decade of working with small and large Maine towns. The library provides a starting point for local calibration. Communities can identify a local problem, and pull whatever sections and standards from the Place Code library to address their particular local problem. The set of standards can then be calibrated to better respond to local conditions.
For decades, Maine communities have been saying one thing in their comprehensive plans, and then getting something different on the ground as development occurs. This is often because of zoning, which is the playbook and instruction manual for development. Conventional zoning codes often make it illegal to develop in a pattern that is consistent with Maine’s most loved places. What we want is illegal, and what we don’t want is required. This is the fundamental reason why there is so much tension around development today.
Most zoning codes across Maine were a cut and paste of 1960s vintage planning concepts, which favored low density development, separated into pods of uses. This use-based zoning is why we see shopping centers surrounded by parking lots, housing subdivisions on 1-acre lots with no roads connecting them to nearby shopping areas, and offices in separate pods remote from downtowns. Before suburban zoning was adopted across America and in Maine, development happened in a mixed-use pattern, where housing, shops and businesses were located close to each other.
The problems with the low-density suburban pattern have been well documented, and include:
The PlaceCode is an alternative set of zoning standards that can be adopted in whole or in part, with local calibration, to provide an instruction manual for development that responds to local community goals and aspirations.
The PlaceCode toolbox has been used in many communities across Maine, including Newcastle, Scarborough, and Windham, with form-based approaches also used in Auburn, Topsham, and other communities of varied sizes and characteristics. Each community has taken a unique approach, and many lessons learned are embedded in the PlaceCode, providing a shared resource full of best practices that can and should be calibrated locally.