Phoenix has the zoning for more height in its downtown, and future development might finally yield a more recognizable skyline.
Grace Oldham reports from Phoenix to explain the city's short building stock compared to many other cities of comparable population and preview how recent zoning code changes could yield taller buildings on the city's skyline.
Oldham interviews Joshua Bednarek, Phoenix's deputy director of planning, on the subject of the city's shorter skyline. Bednarek gives credit to the automobile for spreading the city out, and preventing the development of a vertical downtown. "With infrastructure and technology allowing increased accessibility to the entire Valley, residential and business patterns never created pressure to develop work and living space in the city's core," writes Oldham.
The city also planned for a "village system" in the 1980s, spreading its highest buildings around the city, further ensuring that the city lacks big, signature skyscrapers. Still, Downtown Phoenix has emerged "as the hub of the polycentric system today much more so than in the past," according to Bednarek, and zoning changes in 2010 and 2015 could encourage new height in the downtown core.
FULL STORY: 'Polycentric city': Why doesn't downtown Phoenix have more skyscrapers?
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Eagle County Government
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Nashville Planning Department
The Architects Foundation
University of Cincinnati Online
The Pocatello Development Authority
The Urban Renewal Agency of the City of Pocatello
Journal of the American Planning Association