Q: What’s this all about?

A: “Developing Common Ground” is a short-term project with long-range goals for guiding the future development of both downtown Winter Park and our primary commercial thoroughfares. The idea is to draft a regulating plan – a zoning code – that assures that new construction in key areas is in harmony with Winter Park’s village character. To get maximum input from citizens, business people, design professionals, and elected officials and staffers, we’re staging a public “charrette” in mid-April to sort through ideas and shape the new code.

Q: What’s a “charrette”?

A: The kind of charrette we’re talking about is a multi-day workshop that pulls everyone who has an interest in the outcomes of the process into a highly focused discussion. Unlike most brainstorming sessions and visioning discussions, a charrette adds the additional phase of production. The talking must lead to a plan for doing something. In this case, the plan that comes out of the charrette will be the first draft of a code. Professional consulting teams facilitate the discussion and supply on-site expertise to help participants work through design, engineering, and legal issues. Illustrators speed idea-testing by depicting the effects of decisions on buildings and streetscapes. Everyone works in near continuous feedback loops to move quickly from broad visioning to hands-on planning. With policy-makers and citizens engaged directly with one another in a concentrated time frame, charrettes overcome the frustration of drawn-out meeting processes, rewarding everybody with consensus-driven outcomes ready for near-immediate implementation. Final results, including an ordinance ready for official review, can come in a matter of weeks instead of months or even years.

Q: Who’s behind this?

A: This is a City of Winter Park project. A citizen committee, the Architectural Standards Task Force, has set the goals and helped define the process. Two consulting teams, Canin Associates and PlaceMakers, have been hired to plan and stage the charrette and to deliver a new code to guide future Winter Park development in key areas.

Q: Why are we doing this? Don’t we already have zoning in Winter Park?

A: Winter Park has a Land Development Code (LDC) that, like most conventional zoning ordinances, largely regulates uses within specific districts. But it’s become increasingly apparent that the existing ordinance doesn’t address certain issues of concern to many residents and business people. Recent debates about the future of development in Winter Park’s downtown have been more about the form of new construction – the shape and height of buildings, plus how they relate to the street, the sidewalk, and to one another – than about what goes on inside buildings. We need a better tool for guiding new development that focuses on form. We need, in other words, a “form-based code.”

Q: What would a form-based code regulate?

A: A form-based code makes a big deal about the look and feel of spaces we all share – the street and sidewalks; parks, plazas, and other public open spaces. The feel of the public realm is what we’re talking about when we talk about the “character” of a place. Winter Park’s distinct character is derived from how its man-made structures shape the environment residents and visitors sense when they travel down a street or stroll through Central Park. What a form-based code does is prescribe rules for shaping future construction that contributes to that character as opposed to detracting from it. While there are certain basic principles for place-shaping that apply just about everywhere, Winter Park needs to customize code categories so they apply specifically to this unique spot on earth. That’s what the charrette will do. With lots of public input, it will identify the custom elements that give Winter Park its distinct character, then convert them into a range of rules for setbacks, frontages, building heights, and other form-shaping characteristics. Want to dig deeper into form-based codes? Here are two great places to start: www.formbasedcodes.org and www.smartcodecomplete.com.

Q: Is this just another limit on personal property rights? What’s the benefit?

A: Zoning, by definition, imposes certain reasonable limitations and this process is no exception. However, the overall goal inherent in a form-based approach is not to further stifle creativity or property rights but, rather, to focus those energies in directions where value for the property owner also creates value for the greater community. Ideally, form-based codes can be a tool with the potential to remove or limit contention and angst from the development process because the community – both citizens *and* the business/development community – come together in the charrette to create mutually agreed upon criteria.

By making potential outcomes more predictable, benefits emerge for both sides. For citizens, there's greater confidence in how the city will evolve over time, which can reduce anxiety over future property values and quality of life but also reduces a culture of vigilance and suspicion that can occur when development scenarios are uncertain and people feel a need to fight to achieve their objectives. Predictability works equally well for the property owner/development community. Adhering to a particular criteria that business people had a voice in creating removes uncertainty from the process. This reduces friction with neighboring communities, which reduces time spent – in hearings, in arbitration, or litigation – which, in the development community, translates directly to dollars.

Furthermore, though Architectural Guidelines are one of the deliverables within this process, style will remain at the discretion of the property owner. The design guidelines being developed are intended to serve as a development resource, not a regulatory device.

Q: When and where is our charrette?

A: April 11-15 at the Winter Park Welcome Center, 151 West Lyman Ave.

Q: Who can participate?

A: All sessions are not only open to the public, they’re organized to make the most of public input. Some meetings within the charrette are focused specifically on topics such as downtown retail issues or traffic and parking management. Three big meetings involve general presentations – the opening presentation, a mid-charrette report, and the final presentation. The charrette studio, where the consulting teams will work on alternative ideas proposed by participants, will be open for drop-by visits until the very last stages of production for the final presentation.