Free tool helps municipalities plan livelier, healthier neighborhoods

University Park, Pa. -- Whether the goal is helping rural areas retain open space while accommodating development, transforming stagnant suburban and urban tracts into more traditional neighborhoods, or fostering public health and decreasing traffic with pedestrian-friendly amenities, a new, free Penn State tool promises to ease the chore of navigating Pennsylvania’s complex Municipal Planning Code.

“Although Pennsylvania has more than 2,500 municipalities, only half have zoning regulations and many of the rest are using outdated ordinances that do not incorporate best practices in neighborhood design and development,” says Michael Rios, director of the Hamer Center for Community Design Assistance at Penn State. “That’s why our team of architects, landscape architects and planners worked for three years with people throughout the state to create an intuitive, multimedia tool that has both an educational and a technical focus that’s accessible to many types of users.”

Called PennSCAPEs (Pennsylvania Strategies, Codes and People Environments), the tool is available to elected officials, developers and concerned citizens who want to learn about community design strategies that promote healthy lifestyles and compact, walkable neighborhoods that are sensitive to the environment in new and existing urban and rural communities. While not favoring rural over urban styles, or vice versa, the tool highlights and dynamically illustrates ideas for mixing businesses and residences, offering variety in housing choices, and providing settings for passive and active recreation. PennSCAPEs details issues and practices in community design in more than 500 illustrations, and includes simplified sample codes that municipalities may incorporate into their own zoning regulations.

A CD-ROM version of PennSCAPEs has already proven very popular with early users. The CD-ROM requires Internet Explorer for Windows 5.5 or 6.0, Quicktime and Flash Player. A Web-based version launched this month is accessible at http://www.pennscapes.psu.edu

PennSCAPEs benefits from the input of numerous developers, planners, engineers, non-profit leaders, state agencies and average citizens from across the Commonwealth, and is rooted in a recent update to the Pennsylvania Municipalities Planning Code that includes a “traditional neighborhood development” section.

“As we worked on this project, we kept in mind that nearly 70 percent of Pennsylvanians are considered ‘at risk’ for health problems related to a lack of physical activity,” says Kelleann Foster, associate professor of landscape architecture and co-principal investigator for the project with Rios. “Dispersed, or low-density, settlement patterns that segregate land uses and increase dependence on automobiles are partly to blame. We’ve devoted considerable attention to ways to connect neighborhoods with each other, and with other parts of towns, through trails, parks and pedestrian-friendly streets that promote walking and bicycling.”

The PennSCAPEs researchers say that there is a strong need to assist Pennsylvania communities in learning about the interrelationships between land use, transportation trends and physical activity, and to expose them to new Pennsylvania state enabling legislation that encourages compact, traditional neighborhood design and development.

Adds Rios, an assistant professor of architecture and landscape architecture, “We’re emphasizing community qualities and choice rather than quantities and prescriptions of the elements and sizes for buildings, streets and lots that are required by zoning ordinances.”

One special feature of PennSCAPEs is that it simplifies the numerous, and often cumbersome, residential zoning classifications into three types of neighborhoods -- rural residential, clustered residential and mixed-use. Within the context of each neighborhood type, options are illustrated for five key “building blocks” of design: open space, stormwater management, streets and blocks, lots and buildings, and building performance. All of these components are highly illustrated in a specially created multimedia format.

Thomas Hylton, author of “Save Our Lands, Save Our Towns: A Plan for Pennsylvania,” commends PennSCAPEs for its use of “an intuitive, point-and-click system that allows the average citizen to visualize the appearance of various forms of development by offering a bird’s eye perspective of it on the computer screen.” Hylton adds that with its improvements on standard book illustrations, “PennSCAPEs has the advantage of being able to layer different scenarios on the same background, which the viewer can choose and compare with the click of a mouse.”

Endorsements for the project have come from such organizations as 10,000 Friends of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Planning Association and the Pennsylvania Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

PennSCAPEs was created with support from the Claneil Foundation, the Don Hamer Foundation, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the Visual Interactive Communications Group. Other co-investigators with Rios and Foster from Penn State’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture were Timothy P. Johnson, associate professor of landscape architecture, and Scott Wing, assistant professor of architecture. MaraLee Gabler, a registered landscape architect, managed the project for the Hamer Center for Community Design Assistance, an outreach unit of Penn State’s College of Arts and Architecture. Anna Breinich, director of community planning for the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, served as a consultant on the project.

To access PennSCAPEs on the Web, visit http://www.pennscapes.psu.edu To obtain a media copy in CD-ROM format, or for more information on the Hamer Center, call (814) 865-5300 or e-mail mxr43@psu.edu. The center’s Web site is http://www.hamercenter.psu.edu/