Form-Based Codes Institute at Smart Growth America

FBCI Welcomes New Board and Resource Council Members

FBCI is pleased to welcome seven new Board members as it diversifies and adds new skills to its expert Board of Directors. We are excited to have this infusion of talent, experience, and energy onto our Board. The seven new Board members are:

  • Brandon Palanker, Vice-President, Marketing and Public Affairs at Renaissance Downtowns in Plainview, NY. Brandon brings extensive experience working in communities on form-based codes as a developer and community liaison.
  • Norman Garrick, Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT. Norman is an internationally respected expert on new urbanist street design and former Board member of the Congress for the New Urbanism.

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    Seven new members including Robert Gibbs, seen here at FBC 201 in Lansing, have joined FBCI’s board.

  • Mark Gillem, Professor, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR. Mark is also Principal of The Urban Collaborative, a firm that writes form-based codes and has written design and coding manuals requiring form-based codes at military installations for the US Department of Defense. He teaches form-based coding at the University of Oregon.
  • Robert Gibbs, President of Gibbs Planning Group in Birmingham, MI. Bob is nationally and internationally known as the “go-to” expert on retailing in walkable communities, especially those governed by form-based codes.
  • Marina Khoury, Partner at DPZ Partners, LLC, the firm that pioneered the use of form-based codes in the 1990s. Marina is based in DPZ’s Gaithersburg, MD office and is also a member of the Transect Codes Council. She was one of the principal authors of Miami 21, the first city-wide form-based code for a large city adopted in the United States.
  • Tony Perez, Director of Form-Based Coding for Opticos Design in Berkeley, CA, one of the leading firms in the practice of form-based coding. Tony has been a long-time instructor for FBCI and has been active on our Resource Council and Education Committee. He also teaches form-based coding at Cal Poly and UCLA.
  • Michael Hathorne, Senior Planning Manager for Suburban Land Reserve, the land development arm of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah. Mike is president of the Utah chapter of CNU and has worked in real estate development since 1994.

    Tony Perez, one of the foremost coding experts in the US, is a new addition to the FBCI Board.

    Tony Perez, one of the foremost coding experts in the US, is a new addition to the FBCI Board.

FBCI is also pleased to announce that four former Board members who have served the organization for a long time and with great distinction have been elected to Board Member Emeritus status. We welcome their continued involvement with FBCI as time and scheduling permit. These include Kaizer Rangwala, Bill Spikowski, Bob Sitkowski, and Dan Slone.

FBCI also welcomes three new members to our Resource Council:

  • David Broz, Principal and firmwide Education Practice Area Leader at Gensler, a large international architectural firm based in Chicago.
  • Peter Park, Principal of Peter J. Park, LLC, City Planning and Design, in Denver, former planning director for Milwaukee and Denver.
  • Matthew Lawlor, Partner at Robinson and Cole’s Boston law office, an active member of CNU-New England, and an instructor for FBCI.

Their wisdom and expertise will be invaluable to FBCI in the coming year.

About the Author

Joel Russell has been writing zoning codes, including many form-based codes (FBCs), for more than a quarter century. He served for two years as FBCI's executive director.

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