Animating Performance Zoning at Sustainability's Competitive Edge

Abstract:     

This paper argues that economic competitiveness requires cities and towns to reimagine their zoning regulations, leveraging technology advances to address challenges revealed by demands for sustainability in building urban projects. The optimal means to accomplish this is to implement performance guidelines in zoning regulations. Performance standards encourage creative solutions to negative impacts caused by increasing development densities. Performance zoning consists of a series of standards addressing specific sub-optimal neighborhood or community impacts of commercial development; these standards express municipal goals for sustainability and environmental justice. Pivoting to performance zoning from standard Euclidean zoning is desirable because the development community has a firmer grasp on how to mitigate negative externalities than does the typical regulating bureaucracy operating without a partnership with experts from the private sector. I assert that community competitiveness, enticing Millennials to join sustainability – focused enterprises and occupy sustainable buildings, is advanced by adopting performance zoning conventions. The paper initially reviews fundamentals of community competitiveness; then describes the Millennial generation’s support for sustainability benchmarking; it next describes illustrative technology innovations introducing a new era of built-environment sustainability performance; and finally it addresses why performance zoning protocols optimally advance community sustainability while growing competitiveness through increased livability.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 76

Keywords: sustainability, sustainable development, sustainable offices, sustainable real estate projects, performance zoning, zoning ordinances, zoning codes, flexible zoning scheme, commercial property development, commercial offices, land use regulation, land use codes, building performance

JEL Classification: K11, K23, K32, Q48, R14