Steve Price

Steve Price is a specialist in community visualization techniques at his company Urban Advantage in El Cerrito, CA. He has worked with most of America’s leading new urban designers and his images have been published in numerous books, newspapers, and national magazines.

Author's Website

RSS Feed

FBCI Book Review: Zoned in the USA

Form-based codes are a big improvement over conventional zoning, but that’s a hard argument to make if advocates have a poor understanding of zoning and its history. Zoning is one of the least understood undercurrents shaping our world and experience. As affordable housing is increasingly out of reach for many Americans and the planet heats […]

Zoning and Streets: Uniting or Dividing Communities

“Form-based codes aren’t cheap. If we keep the existing zoning map and add some building-form standards, we’d be almost there.” Some planning directors have had these hopeful thoughts when deciding whether to pursue a form-based code. The question acknowledges the need to make changes to zoning, but naively hopes for simple tweaks. Zoning that effectively […]

A Small City with a Big Vision: Chattanooga’s New Form-Based Code

Chattanooga’s form-based code is part of an innovative vision for the city’s economic, environmental and cultural future. Following a recent visit to Chattanooga, Bruce Katz wrote in a Brookings Institute blog, “Something special is happening in Chattanooga.” As Katz points out, too often venture capitalists “pay too little attention to small and mid-sized cities with […]

Visualizing Better Rules

Form-based codes can transform the development of public spaces. Watch this video to see transformations taking place one step at a time.

Fundamentals of Fenestration

How much of a building exterior is covered with openings, in particular windows and doors, how transparent the enclosing glass is, and how the openings are arranged are issues of fenestration. Not all form-based codes concern themselves with building fenestration. FBCs commonly regulate street width, block size, and buildings’ disposition on their lots and orientation […]