Urban Planning Editing and Proofreading Services

An urban design guideline states that new buildings along a commercial street should have a "contextually appropriate street presence" that is "sensitive to the character of the area." A developer's architect reads this, designs a building with a blank ground-floor wall facing the street and parking accessed from the front, and argues in the design review meeting that this is contextually appropriate because a similar blank wall exists two blocks away. The reviewer disagrees. Neither party is wrong about what the guideline says, because the guideline never actually said anything specific enough to be wrong about.

We edit what urban design and planning teams produce to specify what "appropriate" development actually requires — urban design guideline criteria and their measurable specifications, streetwall and massing requirement disclosures, design review criteria and precedent documentation, and the correspondence explaining to an applicant why a specific design does or does not meet a stated guideline. Our editors work on the gap between a guideline that describes a general intention and one that states a criterion a design can actually be measured against.

The measurable design criterion is what an urban design guideline actually needs behind its stated intention, and its failure is language descriptive enough to justify almost any design a developer's architect wants to defend. Contextually appropriate and sensitive to the character of the area describe a goal; they do not specify a minimum percentage of active ground-floor frontage, a maximum blank wall length, where parking access may be located, or what building height relative to the street width is actually being sought, and a design reviewed against only the descriptive language has nothing specific to measure it against. We work through these so ground-floor active frontage is stated as an actual minimum percentage of the street-facing facade, since "street presence" translated into a minimum 70% active frontage with no more than 6 metres of blank wall in any continuous run gives both a designer and a reviewer the same number to design and assess against; so parking access location is stated specifically, given that "sensitive to the character of the area" says nothing about whether vehicle access from the primary street frontage is acceptable, and this is frequently the actual point of disagreement; so height and massing are stated relative to a specific, measurable reference — street width, adjacent building heights — rather than a general instruction to be sensitive to context, because sensitivity is not a criterion a design review can apply consistently across different applicants; so any precedent cited to justify a design is checked against the guideline's actual current criteria rather than accepted because a similar example exists nearby, given that an older approval may predate a criterion that has since changed, and citing it as justification does not establish that a new design actually meets the current standard; and so a design review response addresses the specific criterion a submission fails or meets, not a general assessment of whether the design feels appropriate. Guidelines written this way mean a design review decision can be explained by reference to a stated standard, not defended or disputed by two parties each reading the same vague sentence differently.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including guideline drafts, design submissions and review correspondence. We are editors rather than urban designers, planners or design review board members, and we offer no view on design quality, guideline criteria or review determinations. What we can do is make sure the guideline states something a design can actually be measured against.