Randall Arendt - Conservation Planner
During the Lori DeLuca administration, Mr. Arendt helped write the Conservation Incentives for Flower Mound and assisted in the design of the rural Chimney Rock Conservation Development. He was a speaker at two of the Open Space Symposiums during the Mayor Lori DeLuca administration. During the 2013 Flower Mound Master Plan Update, he corrected the new council's misinterpretation of his rural conservation design principles through correspondence with several residents. Urban conservation design principles differ from rural. An example of urban conservation design is Sanctuary, bordered by Old Settlers, McKamy, and Simmons.
3 POPULAR BOOKS BY RANDALL ARENDT
1. Conservation Design for Subdivisions: A Practical Guide to Creating Open Space Networks
Island Press; Co-published by the American Planning Association and the American Society of Landscape Architects.
160 pages; 22 color plates, Step-by-step site plans for seven properties; Model ordinance language (key provisions).
Conservation Design for Subdivisions presents a simple step-by-step approach to designing subdivisions around the central organizing principle of protecting open space, and shows how communities can adopt new standards in their plans and ordinances to ensure that future developments follow this design approach in a way that will ultimately produce an interconnected network of conservation lands throughout their land areas.
This is a practical handbook for landowners, local officials, residential developers, engineers, and surveyors that explains how to lay out new neighborhoods where half to three-quarters of the land remains as permanent open space. This result is achieved in a "density-neutral" manner that respects the equity of landowners and the rights of developers to create the full number of houselots allowed under current zoning.
The approach described in this handbook provides a fair and equitable means of balancing conservation and development objectives, and offers an opportunity for developers and conservationists to meet in the middle, creating more livable communities in the process.
The key to conserving natural resources and cultural features within new developments is to rearrange density on each subdivision tract as it is being laid out, so that only half (or less) of the developable land is cleared, graded, and turned into lawns, driveways, streets, and cul-de-sacs. In this way, homes are built in a less land-consumptive fashion allowing the balance of the property to be permanently protected and added to an interconnected system of green spaces and greenway corridors crisscrossing towns, townships, and counties where these principles are incorporated into the basic design standards for new development.
The handbook contains fully-illustrated case examples showing the four-step methodology applied to seven properties exhibiting a wide range of pre-existing conditions, including riparian, lakefront, and coastal sites with woodlands, meadows, and fields. These sites also contain a variety of natural, cultural, historic, and features such as critical habitats, environmentally sensitive resources, noteworthy geological formations, architectural landmarks, stone walls, battlefield earthworks, and scenic viewsheds. Most of these special areas are accorded zero protection under most zoning and subdivision codes, which allow all land except floodplains, wetlands, and steep slopes to be fully developed.
With its model regulatory language, this handbook provides local officials with the means to correct the deficiencies in their present ordinances. The clear graphics and highly readable text provide lay readers with the understanding they need to make a persuasive case to their local leaders, for the adoption of such standards to prevent conventional land-use regulations from producing "wall-to-wall subdivisions" across their community -- as they undoubtedly will, in the absence of a different model that accommodates development in a more compact and environmentally sensitive fashion.
Selected Chapters: Main Points
Advantages of Conservation Design: Explores the economic, environmental, ecological, social, and recreational advantages of conservation subdivisions.
Roles and Responsibilities of Various Parties: Shows how different groups -- from planners and developers to planning commissioners and landowners -- can encourage (or require) conservation subdivision design.
Steps Involved in Designing Conservation Subdivisions: Outlines a step-by-step process communities can use to collect pertinent resource information and to shape the resulting pattern of conservation and development.
Linked Conservation Lands in Open Space Networks: Demonstrates how to use tools such as area-wide maps to help communities protect their "green infrastructure" with new open space each time land is subdivided, in an interconnected way.
Conservation Subdivision Design on Seven Sites: Shows how conservation planning principles are applied to protect woodland habitat, productive cropland, historic resources, and scenic landscapes on seven different properties, illustrating, inland, riparian, lakefront, and coastal situations.
Regulatory Improvements: Suggests specific ways to modify zoning and subdivision regulations to codify conservation practices, explaining the technical model ordinance language contained in the appendix.
Managing Conservation Lands: Addresses many ownership and management issues, and describes how communities can ensure continual maintenance of common and “non common open space” according to approved plans specific to each site.
Critical Praise for Conservation Design for Subdivisions
"Randall Arendt has produced a simple, clear, understandable, persuasive, and well-illustrated manual. The application of its principles can assist developers to plan and design with sensibility and intelligence, and planners and officials to evaluate and appraise proposals. I recommend it highly." - Ian L. McHarg, Professor Emeritus, Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, of Pennsylvania
"Randall Arendt has done it again. This time he speaks of a 'greener vision' in his intelligent, articulate, and exceptionally useful book, Conservation Design for Subdivisions. His ideas, advice, and suggestions can make this greener vision a reality, creating places that people will have to care about." - Tony Hiss, author of The Experience of Place and co-author of A Region at Risk
"Imagine with me, if you will, a subdivision planning manual written for developers. Now imagine the same tome reflecting the interests of conservation organizations. Imagine that the realtor's concerns and the considerations of the planning commission were also dealt with. Now imagine that this volume is easily readable. Randall Arendt has fit all of these warring propositions between two covers. Clear and logical, with charts and lots of appendices, and liberally sprinkled with graphics, this book is practical and focused, with a section for nearly everyone." - Peter Anderson, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University
"The balance between conservation and development, between preserving the environment and creating living landscapes, is a fundamental challenge of our time. The design and layout of residential neighborhoods is where this balance is all too frequently distorted. The result is the loss of environmental values and a lack of human community. Randall Arendt provides superb illustrations demonstrating that we need not accept the status quo. He has prepared a wonderful guide for how to design communities with the nature of places." - Frederick Steiner, Professor and Director, School of Planning and Landscape Architecture, Arizona State University
2. Growing Greener: Putting Conservation into Local Plans and Ordinances
Island Press; Co-published by the American Planning Association and the American Society of Landscape Architects.
Growing Greener is an illustrated workbook that presents a new look at designing subdivisions while preserving green space and creating open space networks. It shows readers how to design residential developments that maximize conservation without reducing overall building density, thus avoiding the political and legal problems associated with "down-zoning".
It offers a three-pronged strategy for shaping growth around a community's natural and cultural features, demonstrating ways of establishing or modifying the municipal comprehensive plan, zoning ordinance, and subdivision ordinance to provide a strong conservation focus, Open space protection becomes the central organizing principle for new residential development, and the open space that is preserved is laid out to form an interconnected system of protected lands running across the community.
Growing Greener builds upon and expands the basic ideas presented in Conservation Design for Subdivisions, broadening the scope to include more detailed sections on the comprehensive planning process and specific information on how zoning ordinances can be updated to incorporate the concept of conservation design.
Growing Greener includes eleven case studies of actual conservation developments in nine states, and two exercises suitable for group participation. Case studies include: Ringfield, Chadds Ford Township, PA; The Fields at St. Croix, City of Lake Elmo, MN; Prairie Crossing, Grayslake, IL; The Meadows at Dolly Gordon Brook, York, ME; Farmcolony, Stannardsville, VA; The Ranch at Roaring Fork, Carbondale, CO, The Ponds at Woodward, Kennett Township, PA, et al.
It is the first practical publication to explain in detail how resource-conserving development techniques can be put into practice by municipal officials, residential developers, and site designers, and it offers a simple and straightforward approach to balancing opportunities for developers and conservationists.
3. Rural by Design: Planning for Town and Country
Planners' Press; American Planning Association.
This 552-page volume, written in a highly readable and lively style, represents a very extensive updating of the first edition and contains almost 80 percent new material. Like the original version, this new book provides an unparalleled resource for practicing planners, members of local boards and commissions, students in degree courses, those teaching them, and young professionals preparing for the AICP exam. A comprehensive reference book, it is filled with useful material and examples that are easily understood and ready to be applied in day-to-day planning in the suburbanizing parts of metropolitan regions, and beyond.
As the planning world has evolved over the past two decades, this new edition provides more information on more topics. For example, it contains entirely new chapters on form-based coding, visioning, sustainability, low-impact development, green infrastructure networks, and transfers of development rights. It also expands coverage of town centers, commercial corridors, housing options, village and hamlet planning, and individual case studies.
Additional new topics addressed include complete streets, pocket neighborhoods, official mapping, gateway planning, redeveloping commercial corridors, mitigation banking, vernal pool protection, waterway daylighting, and restoring wetlands, grasslands, woodlands, and floodplains.
At the same time, fact-filled chapters providing relevant information on nitty-gritty issues such as street design, stormwater management, affordable housing, and farmland preservation have been retained and substantially updated.
To enrich the learning experience, the number of case studies has nearly doubled, from 38 to 70. Similarly, the number of individual illustrations has increased from 360 to nearly 900, making this a highly visual book. These photographs, site plans, aerial perspective sketches, and cross-sections illustrate practical solutions to the challenges facing many rural and suburban communities across the country.
One of the core messages of this new edition (like the original one) is that the broad concept of “rural” lies largely in the eyes of the beholders, and that rural elements such as greenways, parks, and open space are not only appropriate, but indeed are necessary, for the healthy functioning of the more densely developing communities of the 21st century. This volume therefore pays special attention to various planning techniques for producing a more livable future, answering fundamental human needs for greenspace and parkland (described by E.O. Wilson as “biophilia”), while at the same time building more responsibly, efficiently, and sustainably where urban services exist or can be easily extended.
Possibly the most promising avenue for exploration is the basic greenway concept, which can be adapted to areas as different as rural hinterlands and urban cores. Greenways provide connectivity within ecological systems and provide linkages within and among human settlements. The best land-use plans are therefore based on greenways, with communities designed with nature and for people. Greenway planning, in its broadest sense, is therefore a recurring theme of this new edition. As noted in chapter 8, this enlightened approach can be easily integrated into both new urban planning and conservation design.
Summing up, this new edition has been designed to be even more helpful to readers than the original volume, listed as one of 39 books recommended for “the essential planning library” by the American Planning Association, and required reading for the AICP exam.