The starting point for any plan – whether for a new neighbourhood, revitalization of a downtown or urban corridor, or an entire city – is a shared community vision of what that place should be in 20 or 50 years’ time. The Vision Plans that we help our clients prepare are based on solid research and analysis of the locale, public outreach and broad consultation, an iterative and open design process that proposes and tests alternatives, and a rich palette of diagrams and illustrations that help everyone clearly visualize alternative outcomes and contribute to informed choices.

Form-Based Codes

A Vision Plan expresses community preferences for land uses and intensities, and also for street networks, open space design, building character, and a wide range of other topics that conventional zoning codes are not well equipped to describe. We prepare form-based codes that “reverse engineer” a Vision Plan into a “kit of parts” that encodes the places – the streets, the greens, the houses, the shops and offices – that the community agreed upon. These codes perform all the functions of typical zoning codes, adding the vital layers of design information that are critical to delivering the community’s vision for its future.

Specific Plans

The Specific Plan is a tool defined by state law in several states to allow a customized set of development standards to be legally adopted for a specific property or area. Abfort Associates has almost 10 year experience in using this tool to enable the adoption of form-based codes and other customized standards to guide the development or regeneration of neighborhoods, downtown districts, employment districts and corridors.

General Plans

The long-range plan for a town or city is based on a shared community vision for the future of the community, and typically includes written descriptions of intended outcomes, policies, programs and actions to guide growth and change. The same richly illustrated public processes that allow our vision plans to inform and support community conversations around a neighborhood or district can equally be applied to an entire community, enabling discussion and visualization of alternative strategies to balance growth, preservation, economic vitality and quality of life.