Newton Zoning Redesign - Newton, MA

Zoning

Newton Zoning Redesign - Newton, MA

City of Newton

Form + Place helped lead a two-part forum that engaged the local design community to test new zoning criteria being proposed for village and residential districts in the City of Newton. In rewriting Newton’s zoning ordinance to become “contextually-based,” the City is hoping to move away from Floor Area Ratio [F.A.R.] as a driving factor in determining the appropriate scale of development on a given site. The current F.A.R.-based language has led to the construction of numerous new “monster homes” that are out of scale with their surrounding context. In addition to organizing the design forums, Form + Place produced test case studies on key sites to help reinforce the validity of proposed dimensional criteria.