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Recently, I traveled with an old college friend who owns a construction company in London. After a long and frustrating phone call with local planning officials about a new housing project, he vented that the UK’s planning process had led to a widespread lack of respect for the construction industry.
He was taken aback when I mentioned that New York had no formal design review process for new construction. This got me wondering: How do we have completely different urban planning systems, one better than the other?
In the UK, the Town and Planning Act 1947 nationalized land development rights. Planning authorities oversee local development plans, which serve as guidelines and inform decisions about scale and visual impact. Applications are reviewed by the Planning Officer and approved by the Planning Board.
However, the United States relies on localized zoning, essentially legal texts written specifically for each town that define development parameters. The first true urban zoning began in New York in 1916 and gave rise to tiered skyscrapers such as the Chrysler and the Empire State Building.
Land uses in the United States, known as disposable zoning districts, are regulated by type such as residential, commercial or industrial, and by a set of prescribed massing standards, including maximum floor area, volume, height, setbacks, lot coverage and density. Unfortunately, states’ complex segregation past (and present) means that zoning restrictions have a long history of exclusion, limiting the use of single-family homes and large lots to divide neighborhoods.
New York City’s zoning resolution is a large legal document. Across 4,000 pages, the text (with few illustrations) covers every aspect of urban development, from single-family homes in Staten Island to supertall towers in Midtown Manhattan. Getting differences on large buildings is nearly impossible and therefore rarely attempted.
Sometimes, landowners can apply to rewrite the zoning text from industrial to residential use, but the process can take two to five years and success is not guaranteed. Instead, large-scale rezonings are often led by city planning departments.
What impact does the lack of a review process have on New York’s built environment? Time and again, “architect criminals” win projects by cutting fees and building cheap, poorly designed buildings, especially in low-income neighborhoods. The city is littered with shoddy work, but every now and then, a gem of a building raises the bar for us all.
However, the quality of the architecture here really depends on the architect and the client
Although buildings on a street have similar heights and setbacks, they can vary widely in materials, colors, and attention to detail. That being said, in New York it mostly works. As a functional grid city where the whole is greater than its parts, New York seems to revel in its brutal dissonance.
In the absence of a formal planning review process, our client had the final say on whether the design could proceed. Here, the zoning process allows them to know exactly what can be built on any site before purchasing the land, and from our perspective, planning for the project’s timeline, cost, and staffing is relatively easy to determine. It is crucial to have a client who values good design and respects the architect.
Does the American system create better buildings than the British system? Probably not; it certainly won’t lead to better planned cities or towns. Anyone who has witnessed first-hand America’s suburban sprawl and its relentless spread into rural communities cannot argue that the American system produces better results than Britain’s unitary planning strategy.
However, the quality of the architecture here really depends on the architect and the client. Do we get more respect? perhaps. But only if we get it right.
>> Read also: Want to work in the US?The difference is more than just feet and inches
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