A Guide to Planning for Community Character

A Guide to Planning for  Community Character adds a wealth of practical applications to the framework that Lane Kendig describes in his previous book, Community Character. The purpose of the earlier book is to give citizens and planners a systematic way of thinking about the attributes of their communities and a common language to use for planning and zoning in a consistent and reliable way. This follow-up volume addresses actual design in the three general classes of communities in Kendig's framework-urban, suburban, and rural.
 
The author's practical approaches enable designers to create communities "with the character that citizens actually want." Kendig also provides a guide for incorporating community character into a comprehensive plan. In addition, this book shows how to use community character in planning and zoning as a way of making communities more sustainable. All examples in the volume are designed to meet real-world challenges. They show how to design a community so that the desired character is actually achieved in the built result. The book also provides useful tools for analyzing or measuring relevant design features.
 
Together, the books provide a comprehensive treatment of community character, offering both a tested theory of planning based on visual and physical character and practical ways to plan and measure communities. The strength of this comprehensive approach is that it is ultimately less rigid and more adaptable than many recent "flexible" zoning codes.

This follow-up volume A Guide to Planning for Community Character addresses actual designs in the three general classes of communities set forth in Kendig's framework-urban, sub-urban, and rural. The practical approaches of this volume are intended to allow designers to succeed in designing communities "with the character that citizens actually want."  Kendig also provides a guide for incorporating community character into the comprehensive plan for a community. In addition, this book shows how to use community character in planning and zoning as a way of making communities more sustainable. All examples in the volume are designed to meet real-world challenges. They show how to design a community so that the desired character is actually achieved in the built result. The book also provides useful tools for analyzing or measuring relevant design features.

Lane Kendig ran The Kendig Keast Collaborative, a planning consulting firm with offices in Houston, Chicago, and Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, for 26 years. He has been writing about the relationship between community design and regulatory tools for more than twenty years. His best known book is Performance Zoning (1980, Planners Press). In 2004 he published Too Big, Boring, or Ugly: Planning and Design Tools to Combat Monotony, the Too-big House (Planners Press). His first volume on community character, Community Character, was published in 2010 by Island Press.