Each semester the Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning Colloquium (LD ARCH 253, Instructor: Matt Kondolf) brings together distinguished speakers (professionals, academics, practitioners, and graduate students) to present projects relevant to the landscape architecture and environmental planning professions. The colloquium attracts a diverse group of students from the College of Environmental Design, and the entire Berkeley community is invited to attend.

Laura Hall
Principal, Hall Alminana, Inc.

"The Transect Based SmartCode: A Model Code for the Building, Block, Neighborhood, Town and Region"

Local governments across the U.S. are increasingly replacing their conventional zoning codes, ones that enable auto-dominant development, with pedestrian-supported, form-based zoning codes. In this presentation, you will learn about a particular type of form-based zoning code, the model SmartCode, which is available for all scales of planning, from the region to the community to the block and building. The freeware SmartCode is intended for local calibration. As a form-based code, the SmartCode keeps towns compact and rural lands open, while reforming the destructive sprawl-producing patterns of separated use zoning.

The SmartCode utilizes the rural-to-urban Transect as its core organizational and ordering concept for sustainable human habitats. The Transect is a powerful tool because its standards can be coordinated across many disciplines. Modules that utilize the Transect and plug into the SmartCode are currently being developed by practitioners in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, planning, sustainable energy, etc., and include sprawl repair, food production natural drainage systems, affordable housing policy, visitability, architecture, lighting, signage, wind power, solar power, agricultural urbanism and more. Hear more about this progressive model code, including examples of how it is being calibrated by municipalities in California and beyond.