Key Facts

  • 1999

    Designed

  • 512,000 ac.

    Project Size

  • Syracuse-Onandaga County Planning Agency

    Client

About Onondaga County

One of DPZ’s first major regional plans, and the first official firm document to employ the transect diagram, this settlement plan addressed the challenge of controlling regional growth in an area where political leadership was almost entirely decentralized to local governments. Since little could be done to enforce a large-scale plan, DPZ instead provided the County a set of toolkits for individual municipalities to use at their own discretion. The tools, which had to sell themselves on their own merits, were grouped into 3 categories: educating tools, regulating tools, and design tools. The educating tools included design guidelines and transportation policy, to steer the County away from sprawl and towards healthy urbanism. Regulating tools included the TND Ordinance as an optional but incentivized alternative to Euclidean zoning. Design tools were provided in the form of “pilot projects.

Karen Kitney, former Director of the Syracuse-Onondaga County Planning Agency which oversaw the project, lauded the Plan’s success, saying “the Plan did what we had hoped and has permeated through the County and its several layers of its government, as well as with developers who are undertaking new development. The model plans were picked up and used.”

Applied Initiatives

Sprawl Repair

Plan

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