 We're coming to the last lips lecture of this month. Today I have the pleasure of introducing David Vega Barakowicz. David is an associate at WXY Architecture and Urban Design and is also an adjunct professor of urban planning and design at Syracuse University. As a city planner and urban designer, David's work explores the instrumentality of codes and shaping the built environment. He's a former senior urban designer at NYC Planning and launched the Designing Cities Initiative at NACTO, the National Association of City Transportation Officials. At NACTO, David spearheaded the production of NACTO's Urban Street Design Guide and Urban Bikeway Design Guide, now standard design guidelines for cities across the country. He's the co-author of Startup City, inspiring private and public entrepreneurship, getting proposals done and having fun, which he wrote with Gabe Plein. David holds a master's of city planning from MIT and a bachelor's in urban studies from Columbia. Welcome, David. Thank you. It's good to be back at Columbia. This is my alma mater, so thank you. So, last week, the Minneapolis City Council voted to end single-family zoning city-wide. Effectively that tripled the city's housing capacity, allowing duplexes and triplexes in single-family neighborhoods all across the country, making up, which had made up about 70% of the land area, and really historically kind of ossified the city's racial and economic segregation. That vote, however, wasn't the first of its kind, and it was really coming off the heels of another really exciting moment in the land use movement that we're in right now, which was California's SB 50, Senate Bill 50, to upzone land around high-frequency transit stops and job-rich opportunity areas, which was really intended to lift California, which has been kind of experiencing this terrible housing crisis, which has been fueled by growth, NINBI-ism, and inflexible land use controls. The New York Times recently did an analysis that showed that most American cities, with the notable exception of New York, have vast areas that are reserved for single-family homes, exacerbating existing inequalities, limiting housing choices, and increasing sprawl. Well, the bulwark of Euclidean zoning, the single-family home, has recently come under attack. Transportation and mobility has equally been characterized by a kind of transformative upheaval, this time by technology. Automated vehicles like Waymo, a spin-off of Google Alphabet, have been trawling the streets and suburbs around Phoenix. Bird scooters descended like locusts on American cities, Santa Monica and Detroit shown here, and the digital mobility hasn't been limited to just transportation and mobility. E-commerce has inundated city streets, turning parking spots into kind of micro-consolidation hubs and bike lanes into grub hub highways. The New York Times recently reported that New Yorkers receive 1.5 million packages per day, and residential deliveries, which have no actual requirements to handle them in zoning, recently overtook commercial deliveries and volume. In the interim, Uber, Lyft, and Via have raced to become the all-in-one aggregator for transportation services of the future, in some markets even partnering with transit agencies to dispatch service or augment public transportation. Collectively, people have more options at their fingertips than ever, even as cities and regions continue to grapple with the chaos that has been induced by some of these radical changes. So this is an exciting time to be a planner, or at least it should be, and it's an opportunity for planners and the planning field to take action. But how? Amidst the kind of not-so-quiet revolution in land use and transportation, the planning field seems to be going in two different directions. On the one hand, we have the smart city, a kind of pent-up expression of 1960s-era futures, redesigned around the internet of things, shown here in Ford's kind of frictionless utopia characterized by automation, on-demand services, and ubiquitous data-different technology. On the other hand, we have the equitable city, kind of pitched focus on resolving entrenched and intractable issues of housing inequality and segregation, echoing the laments of progressive reformers from the era of John Lindsay to the days of Jacob Rees. Yet while we've found ourselves in the midst of a revolution in mobility and housing policy, our spatial thinking still remains entrenched in the era of New Urbanism, limited to half-mile circles around transit hubs, an idea not only re-emphasized by California's SB 50, but legislated as a statewide mandate. These half-mile circles drawn neatly around transit stops have dominated the kind of transportation land-use nexus since the 1980s, even as the number of Americans driving to work every day has increased to over 90% in most cities, even reaching over 75% in transit-rich cities like Chicago and Boston. A recent 2019 study led by Reed Ewing tested the basic underlying assumption that has been the foundation for much of our land-use and transportation policy for decades, which is that density and access to transit will actually reduce auto-dependency measured in vehicle miles traveled. Yet that study, which was led by Ewing, a well-known advocate for sustainable and compact cities, found that it is not only the localized density of individual neighborhoods that causes VMT to be lower in compact urbanized areas, but rather the relative accessibility of neighborhoods to the rest of the region. While studies like these may be unwelcome news to those who have devoted their careers to the promise of sustainable transportation, to the rezoning of transit-oriented neighborhoods, or the creation of light rail systems, the planning field needs to take a step back and reconsider some of the basic building blocks of our field, just as Minneapolis and California and to a lesser degree the self-proclaimed futurists of the tech world have done. Today I want to highlight and suggest three big ideas for the future of city planning. Most of these ideas have some foundation in the history of the field, but have either been forgotten entirely, disappeared from the profession's reading lists, or been deemed failures before their time. Collectively these three ideas, the national plan, mobility-oriented development and performance zoning, seek out a new nexus between land use and transportation, between local, state, and national planning, and to some degree aim to resolve the inherent ideological tensions between the dominant planning themes of our age, the smart city, and the equitable city. Every year as part of my introductory planning course at Syracuse University, I ask my students to select and analyze ten codes from their hometown's zoning ordinance. My goal with that assignment beyond getting students to actually read zoning, which is a challenge, is to really highlight the kind of absurd variation that we have in land use planning in local governments across the United States, and for suburban students in particular to understand how issues of lot coverage, use, density, and affordability have shaped their landscape of single family homes. This year I happen to have a number of students from China in my class, and when handing in their assignments, a group of these students came to me almost apologetically to tell me that most of their zoning codes were all more or less the same. The United States, like many countries, operates based on a system of land use planning that's almost entirely local in its scope and administration, even as individual codes strive to tackle regional, if not national, problems. The absence of national and state planning, however, has a rich and often overlooked history for planners, embodied by the brief surge of national and regional planning led by the Regional Planning Association of America, or the RPAA, a consortium of urban planners, intellectuals, housing reformers, economists, and architects whose wide ranging vision helped give birth to the new deal. The group was led, among others, by Lewis Mumford, the architect Clarence Stein, the housing architect Frederick Ockerman, regional planner and forester Benton Mackay, and the housing expert Katherine Bauer. In his 1925 essay, The Fourth Migration, Lewis Mumford described America's growth in four stages. The first migration, symbolized by the covered wagon, was the clearing of the continent, a history of restless men who burned forests, the forests of the Mohawk Valley in order to plant farms. The second migration was from the countryside and foreign countries into the factory town, a migration symbolized by the iron horse, the railroad, industrial expansion, and steam power. The third migration, meanwhile, concentrated the riches of America into its largest cities, its financial centers, and drained goods, people, and resources from the industrial towns and villages of earlier migrations. What then is the basis of the fourth migration? Mumford asked. For Mumford, the fourth migration would be fueled by the technological revolution then underway, the advent of the motorway, the telegraph, the radio, and electrical transition, dimming the metropolitan impulse that had characterized the third migration by making rural and small town life more palatable. As shown in this series of images from the 1926 New York State Commission on Housing and Regional Planning, a never-adopted manifesto of sorts for the RPAA, a backflow would take place for the metropolis to small towns and cities that had been depopulated and denuded by previous migrations. In a period of flow, Mumford said, men have the opportunity to remold themselves and their institutions according to new wants and necessities, new ideals of life. In contrast to the metropolitan regional plan then being drawn up at the behest of big business interests, at least in Mumford's eyes, the fourth migration would use technology to redistribute wealth back to the small towns and industrial villages that had been depopulated by earlier migrations. He and his collaborator Benton Mackay, the father of the Appalachian Trail, imagined a realignment of economic and cultural resources around a valley-based civilization that would support progress without despoiling natural resources. During the new deal, these ideas were enthusiastically adopted as part of a series of reform-minded agencies including the Resettlement Administration under Rexford Tugwell, the National Planning Board later renamed the National Resources Committee among myriad of other titles, and the newly formed Tennessee Valley Authority, the first of what the regionalists had hoped would emerge as a nascent regional administration based on shared economic interests and cultural values. The TVA, while it only partially fulfilled its promise to integrate new towns and settlements as part of a mission of delivering electricity and technology to rural Appalachia, was a unique interstate development project at the regional level, a precursor to the Interstate Highway Act and a national program committed to achieving regional equity and distribution. While the TVA rumblings in place to this day, other programs included the Greenbelt New Town Program in the Resettlement Administration, very far less well. These experiments were pilloried as excessive, even socialist in character. An overstepping of federal intervention into the matters of state and local jurisdictions and only a handful of towns were ever built before the program was canceled. While the promise of the RPA and the New Deal dimmed with the advent of World War II and the prosperity that followed, its underlying message that planning needed to achieve a national and a regional scale to relate the countryside to the city remained a critical theme of planning through the 1950s. General Motors' 1939 Futurama exhibition, though perhaps best known for its magic motorways, also extolled the virtues of hydroelectric power, new farming practices and technology, and a newfound neotechnic way of living shared by both country and city. As we now know, Mumper's fourth migration came to pass, but not as he had hoped. In the 1950s, a backflow did occur from congested dinosaur cities, yet Mumper's restless men did not return to the rural villages and old town centers he and his collaborators at the Regional Planning Association of America had admired. They moved to the suburbs, the sprawling road towns, and the farmland wastes at the rural urban fringe. This backflow only reinforced the magnetism of great cities at the expense of the countryside. It was a migration facilitated by federally guaranteed mortgages, accelerated by white flight, and subsidized by federal highway infrastructure, a far cry from the idealized de-concentration that Mumford had dreamed of. The economic balance sought between rural areas and metropolitan areas never came to fruition. As in Mumford's era, society is once again in a period of flow. Mobile technology, on-demand mobility, global access to information and data, the rise of social media, together present us with an opportunity to reconsider our basic institutions, the underlying fabric of our cities, regions, and communications networks to dwell on new ideals of life and new experiments of living. Yet our visions are too small. They exist at the scale of intersections and corridors, recasting the fixes of past eras at the local scale rather than using technology as a tool to rethink the regional or even the national balance of the built environment. Migrations, as Mumford called them, are the product of a constant ebb and flow of ideals, a striving for balance and equilibrium between capital, technology, and growth. Each migration is a reaction to, and in some ways even a negation of, the last movement's triumph. Deconcentration, the dream of one era became the nightmare of a new generation of urban planners. Likewise, the rebirth of cities, the aim of the fifth migration created a new crisis of housing and poverty, and world-class cities like San Francisco and New York have become case studies in excessive development and inequality. In today's lecture, I want to explore whether we are on the cusp of a sixth migration and if so, what the spatial implications of that migration might be for cities and regions. With that in mind, I want to suggest a new framework that considers those spatial implications and how cities and regions might adapt in the face of changing technologies. I call this mobility-oriented development. Mobility-oriented development, in contrast to development-oriented transit which characterizes the third migration, and auto-oriented development which characterizes the fourth migration, and transit-oriented development which characterizes the fifth migration is neither anti-city nor anti-suburb. It's dynamic, adaptable, and flexible. It's a product of the age of the Internet of Things. It responds not only to our desire to get from point A to point B but to our unconscious and simultaneous drive to be close yet far, connected yet anonymous, rural yet urban. In contrast to TOD, mobility-oriented development adopts and embraces mobility as a service to increase overall accessibility in our transportation systems. Accessibility is a transportation metric that's based on the integration of land use and mobility. It takes into account not only factors such as walkability, transit access, and travel time, but also the number of jobs and destinations accessible within a specific distance. Whereas other transportation metrics, especially those used to assess automobile travel, focus on travel time, speed, and delay, accessibility provides a complete picture of the multifaceted ways in which multiple transportation agents, systems, and origins, origins and destinations interact. As a metric accessibility analysis is tailor-made for the era of mobility as a service. Mobility as a service can be defined in a few different ways. At its core, it recognizes the potential for alignment between vehicle manufacturers, tech companies, transit agents, and transit agencies to become mobility service providers. Every transit agency in the country should begin thinking of itself as a mobility service provider from here on out, consolidating transit bus and taxi services into a single platform and working with third-party applications to develop routing and payment services. The key technology here, of course, is automation, which, if and when, it does become a reality, would decisively shift the nature of ownership from personal vehicles and transit passes to subscription-based services in the process creating customized platforms for multiple options with less focus on traditional car companies or transit authorities. Mobility, in turn, could eventually become something more like a utility, a core responsibility of a land over, akin to parking today, and facilitated by a third party to operate across a region rather than being an indirect subsidy provided for a solo by the municipality. At a metropolitan level, mobility as a service could have profound implications for how we think about traditional transportation and land use planning. While at a fundamental level, emerging mobility services like bike share and scooters increase our overall catchment area for transit, there's still vast swaths of many regions that lack sufficient access. Traditionally, the recipe for this problem has been to construct a new BRT, or light rail line, to serve that area, a solution that remains viable but often relies on parking rides in low-density areas. The decentralization of land uses in American cities tends to make TOD a rough proposition and one that fixes itself more often than not on the traditional radial concentric city rather than the scattered settlement patterns that characterize development in the U.S. With the rise of four higher vehicles and a newfound interest in microtransit and bus network redesign, many planners have been thinking about this model in a different way and instead contemplating the development or reinforcement of complex and variable feeder systems that can connect scattered land uses in a flexible way while accommodating nonlinear travel patterns and behaviors made possible by automobile travel today. Over time, these feeder systems and ride-hailing services could become more formal networks of integrated multimodal mobility hubs that allow for transit-like services capable of flexibly adjusting to new regional and local travel paradigms. So what would this look like and how could it work? First of all, transit agencies need to shift from running and operating services to managing mobility, contracting directly with third-party operators, apps, and services to run their services. To mitigate the risk of leaving customers open to the excesses of private companies like Uber, agencies need to flexibly develop demanding performance standards for their operators, just as cities have done with bike-share systems. What if third-party bus or micro-transit operators were required to not only meet on-time performance targets, but also decrease dwell time, increase service distribution, serving transit deserts, and decrease empty seats? Traditional transit agencies aren't held to those kinds of challenging performance standards, but performance-based contracts and agreements can and should enable operators to innovate, behaving more like startups than traditional public-benefit corporations can, and they behave more like bureaucracies. Implementing a kind of performance-based mobility as a service system doesn't mean throwing out our entire existing system of public transportation, but it does mean overlaying new processes, applications, and technologies onto our existing systems. Many of these, the MBTA in Boston, Dart in Dallas, and Washington, D.C.'s, WMATA have already begun to implement these kinds of systems, using partnerships with VIA, Uber, and Lyft to complement their existing transit service offerings. Perhaps the greatest challenge for the new startup economy, though, especially in mobility, is that shareholder profits and public benefits may simply not align. If the performance metrics developed by cities break the market rather than shaping it, then it's difficult to imagine how we can successfully leverage technology to improve service. Yet it's unreasonable to think that the current applications in systems being developed by companies like Uber and Lyft are the only means of managing and developing our transportation systems. If MTA in the city were to introduce a payment application that combined metro card services with taxis, buses, and private operators, it's not unimaginable that they could build a formidable competitor to today's ride-sharing companies in New York City, a one-stop shop for all transit and ride-share needs. By consolidating their services and embracing mobility as a service, transit agencies could become competitors in the four-hire vehicle space, which will grow weaker and weaker and more expensive for venture capital subsidies and shareholder profits become the priority. Yet this kind of system is troubled by a kind of simple problem. In any region with low densities, destinations tend to be concentrated, tend to be de-concentrated, and segregated by land-use patterns that require driving. The term performance is frequently used in planning and design today. Yet what does that mean and how is it tied to mobility? Like accessibility, performance zoning is an approach to land-use regulation that issues conventional rigid classifications and formal constraints in favor of goal-based metrics and mechanisms. Today, land-use and transportation policymakers are tethered to a land-use policy playbook that was developed in the era of new urbanism, or even earlier, framed around fixed transit assets and largely ignorant of or even in denial of the reality of technology that technology and mobility are changing in profound ways that might alter the underlying assumptions of our built environment. One of the primary challenges to our current land-use system is that it is essentially a form of end-state planning. In other words, a rezoning or a land-use action proposes the highest and best use for a particular tract of land at a particular point in time and subsequently that land fulfills that ideal or is changed later through a discretionary review process. The problem with this formula is twofold. First, it tends to ignore the potential for land-use codes to adapt over time based on changing environmental, social, and infrastructural conditions, such as surrounding density, new infrastructure, school capacity, or even environmental issues. Second, it foregrounds formal hierarchies over performance or design flexibility. In other words, its conception of land-use is essentially static rather than dynamic. Performance zoning has the potential to be adaptable and inherently flexible, permitting both creativity and design and in-site planning. The history of performance zoning isn't a long one. The idea was first introduced in the United States by a man named Dennis O'Hara to govern industrial emission standards in the city of Chicago. It later became a central tenet of Ian McCard, a pioneering landscape architect and theorist, Ian McCard's land suitability analysis process, which related land and soil conditions to direct and drive growth in particular areas. McCard used performance metrics and performance analysis in the development of an early performance-based zoning code for Medford Township, Pennsylvania, and influenced the performance codes in Staten Island's Special Natural Areas District. In his plan for the woodlands outside of Houston, Texas, McCard used a performance-based system to shift from traditional stormwater drainage to on-site retention. This work was highly influential in popularizing performance processes, including that of Lane Kendig, the person most closely associated with performance zoning, who developed a model code for Bucks County, Pennsylvania in the early 1980s, leading to a short-lived series of experiments in performance zoning. Interestingly, one of the earliest, yet least known performance-based zoning systems was actually instituted right here in New York City in 1975, called Zoning for Housing Quality and the precursor to today's Quality Housing Regulations. The code used a performance-based criteria to enable developers to build higher-quality housing through a special permit. The system had four key criteria, neighborhood impact, recreation space, security and safety, and building interior, within which a developer could attain a certain number of points in order to qualify for FAR, height and setback exemptions. While the goal of this zoning code was to encourage better housing and site design, the complex special permit procedure that was instituted, combined with the administrative complexity of the system itself, led city planning to shift to an as-of-right zoning system for quality housing in the early 1980s. Similarly, complex regulations, like Midtown Zoning's Daylight Evaluation Chart, have challenged architects and administrators who, despite its shortcomings, have gravitated towards far more fundamental mathematical formulas, like the one used to determine floor area ratio for height factor buildings, based on a complex ratio of floor area to open space as a proxy for light and air. Yet newer technologies, including parametric coding scripts and daylight analysis software, enables architects, cities and administrators to analyze the outcomes of developments large and small across a range of metrics. So how might these two ideas actually mesh in practice? As we know, many cities, including New York, in many cities, including New York, fixed transit only covers a portion of the land area in a city. Oftentimes, these subways or elevated lines were themselves built to spur development, with an intrinsic relationship between the construction of new rail and trolley lines and new neighborhoods, a condition most clearly embodied in places like LA or Boston. Traditional TOD planning tends to think of each transit stop as an opportunity for densification, because transit stops have historically been correlated with mixed land uses and thereby with higher levels of overall accessibility, regardless of whether or not a person actually uses transit. Today, new mobility options, such as microtransit, ferry and bike share, have created new opportunities beyond the traditional half-mile circle. A range of options from scooters to ferries, bike share and ride sharing have created potential connections for fixed transit and around it. Collectively, these new mobility options have the potential to increase the overall accessibility of an area and if well-administered, rebalanced and regulated. Nonetheless, changes in transportation remain out of step with fundamental shifts in land use policy. In New York and other cities, land use is traditionally defined by a Euclidean system that segregates areas into commercial manufacturing and residential uses. These uses have an assigned density or floor area ratio, which typically corresponds to the overall infrastructure capacity of an area, or its historical patterns of use, as in the case of a historic port or manufacturing zone. As uses and demands have changed, planners have sought to increase density around transit since that infrastructure already exists and those areas have high accessibility as is. What if, however, instead of density being based on fixed rates the system operated according to measures of performance? In such a system, a developer could, in theory, condition their proposed density based on their own ability to create and monitor additional accessibility. In lieu of traditional parking minimums, maximums or transit bonuses, a developer's FAR would be determined on a sliding scale based on a series of accessibility performance metrics. In turn, areas with low accessibility would be permitted to propose a new mix of uses that could actually increase overall access. New infrastructure services and amenities could contribute to the overall points a developer could obtain. Typical form-based regulatory systems could also be rethought. Today, many cities use a system of FAR, lot coverage setback, and height restrictions to control the shape of their developments. Under a performance-based system, different areas could have different overall targets to generate flexibility, incentivize public benefits. Areas with affordable housing shortages or a lack of supermarkets could also have variable FARs to incentivize that particular use. Likewise, places in flood zones could be incentivized to retain more water on site, provide additional tree coverage, akin to how the City of Seattle's green factor ratio system works today. Whereas conventional regulatory systems tend to prescribe form and density, a performance-based regulatory scheme would adjust density based on the satisfaction of key indicators, including accessibility, amenities, building quality, and sustainability. This system could be flexibly adopted to achieve a variety of goals over time, including affordable housing, access to open space, and even a wide range of options. Access to open space, and even accessibility to transit. But how would this actually work in practice? Today's land use designations are largely the pure view of local governments. Nonetheless, state and national governments actually do play an important role in funding, both in funding and in setting the parameters for future land use decision-making at the local level. At the national level, the federal government could create or sponsor the creation of a goals-based performance overlay. This overlay could be multifaceted, adapting multiple goals across different regions to establish a common language between traditional zoning codes. The federal government's model overlay would then be adapted by each state. States would be responsible for developing a dynamic parametric modeling platform to monitor compliance, ease the administration of the code, and test how individual developments perform on impacts. At the local level, each jurisdiction would adapt the overlay to their key goals in keeping with federal and state standards, and then provide the overlay as a conditional option to developers. Because the overlay would be based on a commonly adopted technological platform and begin as an option, at least at start, the process of development might not change that much at first. Over time, however, developers would be empowered to unlock development potential by meeting key performance indicators, such as increased accessibility, affordable housing production, and environmental targets. The conventional review process would require developers to submit a three-dimensional standardized model to a jurisdiction for compliance. An algorithm-based assessment and store card would be generated to provide an initial FAR score, and then offer an additional feedback mechanism to developers to increase or optimize their development potentials based on a variety of inputs. Monitoring and compliance would be built into the code to ensure that an owner reports performance data over time. As a result, whereas previous developments might have produced duplexes in a sea of parking, developers would now be given the option of additional density if they abide by specific performance parameters, including meeting key thresholds of accessibility, impervious surface area, conservation area, affordable housing, and access to light and air. Every five years, performance criteria and scales would be recalibrated, adjusting the incentives based on new data and information. In other words, if an area's accessibility were to rise over time, its sliding FAR scale could be increased, similar to the way that height factor zoning works in New York City today. Likewise, if sea level rise or environmental concerns in a given area became acute, additional on-site retention requirements could be revised upwards. Areas beyond the traditional transit shed, moreover, could take on new potentials and possibilities at the interface between land use and mobility, creating accessible and mobility-rich development in areas well beyond the fixed transit shed, based on a combination of smart land use planning and decision making, emerging technologies, and local zoning. Ultimately, cities could leverage technology to create a better quality of life, more accessible cities, and a more robust set of environmental protections. To fulfill these goals, planners need to be thinking bigger than ever today. For the first time in generations, arguably since the early 1960s, major questions about how we live, work, ride, and play are the public conscience. The future has become an active question of public debate rather than a 1960s fantasy. People debate the merits and limitations of automation, celebrate the formalization of freelance culture, and the departure from arbitrary restrictions around taxis, food carts, pop-ups, and pilots. This willingness to break the standard, to experiment with new codes and consider new ways of living and working is a byproduct of startup civilization, the good and the bad, a period of risk and experimentation, that is, in some ways, coming to an end. The spatial dimensions of the sixth migration remain uncertain and unpredictable, as our relationship with technology continues to evolve. As planners today, we have an opening to question the underlying form and fabric of our cities and our regions. To do so, however, we must depart from our fixes, discovering the interface between our competing visions of the future, while also striving to complete the unfinished visions of the past. Thank you. Do you foresee a possibility of, say, developers gaining assistance in essay history the cheapest way to reach a higher score? Like, for example, if they find a cheaper way to mass-produce some solar group of green room, then they would snap over of the ability or other aspects of it? So, like, how do you balance between the technical goal? The second question is is it potentially going to blame the victim? So, for example, if there's a labor for them, it has a big market that's getting no more scores because it's a kind of data it's not, you know, it's not booming with opportunities. But in that case, because it has no performance score, that's it has no more developmental capacity and then, like, therefore, mass-attractive to developers, whereas in a market, say, that's booming with opportunities already getting affordability requirements already behind and now they're even given they have a higher performance score now they're even more developing again. Yeah, and so I'll tackle the first question first, and it's something that if you're familiar with land use law, it's kind of the foundation of a very important case called Golden D. Ramapo, New York essentially about jurisdictions, it concerned a jurisdictions ability to stem or manage growth temporarily while it had time to sort of upgrade its infrastructure. The opposite case, which would be essentially an area that has low accessibility, low amenities, and therefore scores quite poorly I think would be an opportunity to create a customized sort of goal-based value system for that particular type of area. One of the examples that I like to use is fresh, so New York City has this program which is intended to essentially incentivize the creation of supermarkets and food deserts. The problem with the program is that when it was developed it sort of created it was developed in a way that created sort of static boundaries around neighborhoods that were food deserts and when the actual initial zoning was passed not taking account of the fact that over time certain neighborhoods might gentrify certain supermarkets might arrive in places that didn't have them and that fresh might be needed in different places around the city. So that would be a perfect example of the kind of code where a land use agency, or in the case of New York City planning would be able to customize series of targets to a particular neighborhood in order to kind of get the right type of development. I think a performance-based system would not be something that could be maintained as static so the goals that you established would have to be consistently revisited and recalibrated in the same way that building codes at a national level are updated on a rolling basis and even street design manuals are updated on a rolling basis by independent non-profit associations that are kind of led by both municipal officials and private practitioners. The barrier historically to performance zoning has not been that people don't believe it works in principle. Its function in principle is fairly being questioned. The barrier has been technological so if you remember this kind of view here essentially the daylight evaluation chart was instituted in midtown zoning with the option to essentially use a more conventional simple sort of simplistic form-based option and so oftentimes what happened with these types of codes is that developers sort of decided that the complexity of actually using either a special permit or the option for a daylight evaluation score was kind of beyond the initial input and investment that they wanted to take to create that proposal. There are exceptions to that rule a really good one is Seattle's green factor ratio that essentially is meant to encourage sustainability in Seattle's developments through building a points-based system for bioswales, previous surfaces and a variety of other amenities geared towards sustainability. I think that that's a great question not only for sort of a theoretical system like this one but also for places like California they're going through that right now we're essentially proposing a kind of statewide land use override is bringing a lot of people that aren't typically engaged in the kind of community design and land use regulation process into the fold and so certainly instituting a system like this would have significant ramifications I will say though one of the benefits of a performance-based system and it's similar in some ways to the way that the New York City originally adopted a points-based system is that it could be introduced in a phased way as a kind of translator between different codes so essentially using quantifiable metrics to create a common language between different jurisdictions initially as an overlay that could be have required adoption for sort of state funding and then later potentially kind of supplanting existing zoning regulations there are going to be places including New York where the zoning is so specific that New York has a kind of as a bright zoning system that is actually not that similar to other places that overlay may always end up being an option rather than a requirement but there are many other places that essentially have zoning that looks exactly the same that just has sort of slightly different language and sort of different requirements across different districts and there are sort of two main differences that I would see in terms of how a performance-based overlay system would work in contrast to sort of traditional density one is in the realm of design flexibility so shifting away from kind of over-reliance on traditional formal mechanisms height, setback, base height in particular areas not including historic districts the other would be that zoning would be based on targets or goals and so for instance New York City's resiliency code which has been in the process of sort of updating and developing in a more robust form since Hurricane Sandy is largely kind of oriented around essentially lifting properties and then making the additional FAR that results from that increase or the additional impacts whether they be street wall or even kind of lot coverage essentially creating a mechanism to resolve that a performance-based system in that particular area might have more outcome-based targets that it's trying to achieve so onsite flood water retention something akin to green factor ratio that would either require, incentivize a certain amount of pervious surface in an area even potentially thinking about goal-based mobility metrics so rather than sort of removing parking minimums entirely actually using a system to create additional incentives for developers to provide certain kinds of mobility so whether that be onsite electric vehicle charging which is already in certain codes car share shuttle services some at more of a kind of district-wide fund level and then others at a sort of location-specific level so it's super interesting your proposal where it's better than the videos scattered on reality talks but on the hardware part it's not like they're not in street infrastructure we still have this competition for the limited curbs curbs space and onsite works and all this limited ammunition or various spaces where you have the delivery of the dockless or docked I share but for the IoT to work you need to have all this wireless you still have to have all this infrastructure installed so I feel like although right now it looks you know more flexible than the fixed model but eventually there's only limited amount of technology that can install all these things so yeah I mean I don't want to suggest that in shifting to kind of mobility as a service or mobility-oriented development system that you could necessarily dispense with the idea of consolidation all together right I mean an efficient system works by providing a series of feeder routes that then consolidate people that have common trips so what I'm suggesting is that development can play a more active role in actually shaping the transportation network and can potentially bring areas that are outside the traditional transit shed into the service area of a traditional sort of transit agency in a more flexible way the other piece in terms of road design I think NACTO's blueprint for autonomous urbanism which sort of starts to think about roadway design in the era of new mobility that I think is not necessarily something that would be in the purview of development except at the sort of more suburban or subdivision scale and certainly one of the big unknowns right now but also one of the opportunities would be for development to actually incorporate some kind of mobility as a service system into the actual kind of development requirements that they would have and so along with that there's certainly new infrastructure requirements roadway widths more multimodal pathways would be kind of part of that shift changes in materiality some of these concepts are kind of being explored in various smart city test kitchens around the country but in terms of the way that development and transportation interact that kind of requirement or that kind of goal is more unprecedented especially about sort of monitoring and sort of being socially performance based code then there's sort of the legal justification for your F.A.R. is would be a continuation of these sort of amenities that you provided to be able to place so having sort of thought through how this would work beyond the sort of approval stage but maybe 20 years and what that would look like theoretically and whether there's maybe technological sort of solutions for that as well but monitoring and this is an area that's sort of already begun to be explored in typically energy environmental performance of buildings but the thinking would be whether or not this is something that existing administrations and existing bureaucracies are sort of set up to handle as an open question as you know is that basically you would require a kind of submission of a certain level of performance data on a given term on a rolling basis in order to get a realistic picture of how zoning is actually working and so Joe, former colleague of mine from New York City Planning, one of the great deficiencies of kind of conventional zoning in New York City and elsewhere is that at a moment in time someone decides to create a particular kind of district at this particular moment in time it could be an innovation district and then 20 years later the assumptions of that district have just fundamentally changed making that zoning either out of date ill-equipped to handle the kind of pressures that it is trying to confront in that era or something that's actively working against your current goals which is the case of height factors on the right and so not only would there need to be a kind of state mandated process to revisit targets and goals underlying performance centers every five arguably 10 but probably five years you would need to have use the robust technology at our disposal to be monitoring and keeping an up-to-date database of how that zoning is performing one of the things that I always found kind of mind-boggling working at the city is there wasn't a 3D model that we had access to of the entire city and so our ability to actually even assess impact ourselves was sometimes constrained to understand the impact of a new building in terms of shadows, how many properties that was affecting there are softwares out there that can do all of this for you and yet our zoning codes are still interpreting things in a very rigid and arguably kind of arcane way like earlier in the talk you were mentioning how one of us concentrated back in the way he envisioned it to be and right now this revolution is saying it's not also because we're expecting the knowledge to fill in a gap to go to the desert to be more evenly distributed what happens for these things is that it's overlapping already there's high demand like the bike share is already at mostly in Manhattan where there better infrastructure or the bike technology is not going to the other side of the digital divide higher amount of services so we're do you think we need a stronger hand like how do you force the new technology to actually go and to think that it's your first time yeah and I think that's a great question and it's a loaded question in part we're not approaching an era where we don't want strong regulation and activist government it's kind of the opposite in a way we want to empower regulators and bureaucracies to be able to more flexibly respond to the pressures that are confronting them or the developers that are trying to gain a system in some way or other and even to private companies that may claim to have public benefits in mind but don't actually and so if you look at New York City's kind of most recent approach to for hire vehicles it's very much along those lines kind of trying to create performance standards that they have to adhere to around dwell time the amount of time that a vehicle can remain without a passenger bike share systems work in a very similar way performance based measures problem with for hire vehicles in particular is that at a certain point in time somebody set a number that was a cap rather than trying to think about either a formula or a process to manage that number and so at it's simplest a performance based zoning system would be a system that's based on managing a process in this case the development of land and the negotiation between communities, developers and city rather than instituting you know kind of somewhat reasonable yet often arbitrary metrics that then soon become out of date if you look at New York City zoning even for towers from like the 1980s what the intentions are it's about trying to kind of recreate an art deco skyscraper envelope and so when you read these regulations they're dated already and in a sense you know it's both a designer and a planner you end up kind of restricted in what you can do and not necessarily being able to meet the spirit of the code due to sort of these extremely rigid regulations not all regulations are bad I think it's without question and in every performance system there are regulations that would be considered more formal that would be designed to create predictability in terms of whether that be you know making sure you don't have a skyscraper in the neighborhood of single family homes and so as Winfrey mentioned there are elements of a conventional land use process that would be reiterated but the overarching system could be managed as more of a process based system and an outcome based system rather than a kind of form of hierarchical system thank you