Zoning as a Shared Language: Why Collaboration, Not Code, Shapes Great Places

Cities come into being through a long sequence of conversations, decisions, and acts of imagination. They are the result of planners thinking about the distant horizon, architects shaping ideas into form, developers balancing possibility and risk, and public staff working to uphold the values and intentions that have guided a community over time. These people do not share the same training or the same day to day responsibilities, yet they all rely on zoning to understand what a place can become. In practice, zoning has become the common reference point for people who otherwise speak very different professional languages.

The difficulty is that zoning rarely functions as a shared language. The text may be the same for everyone, but the meaning shifts depending on who is reading it. A planner reads zoning through the lens of policy and public purpose. An architect reads it through questions of proportion, scale, and allowable form. A developer encounters it through the filter of timelines, budgets, and risk management. Staff inside a jurisdiction carry their own internal memory of how the rules have been applied over many years. Each perspective is valid. Each illuminates something different. Yet none of them, on their own, can fully capture the intent or the experience of the others.

This constant movement between interpretations creates an undercurrent that shapes nearly every early discussion about a site or a project. Before anyone can engage questions of design, feasibility, or community benefit, an enormous amount of effort is spent trying to establish a shared understanding of the rules themselves. That effort is not wasted, but it does have a cost. It slows momentum, diffuses energy, and frequently reopens questions that everyone believed had already been resolved. Over time, the work of translation becomes its own invisible task, one that is repeated in meeting after meeting, sometimes with the same people, sometimes with new people who must be brought back to the beginning.

UrbanForm’s work in Yamhill County revealed just how much this translation work shapes the pace and tone of planning conversations. The collaboration across eleven jurisdictions did not begin with an attempt to rewrite or simplify their zoning codes. Instead, it began with a collective desire to understand them together, to bring each city’s interpretation into alignment with the others, and to replace parallel efforts with a single, coherent foundation. As this alignment took hold, something subtle but powerful began to shift. Staff found that they were no longer spending so much time explaining the basics of their zoning. Developers and designers could begin discussions already grounded in the same reference points. Regional partners, who may not have shared many tools before, discovered that they now shared a common structure of information. Conversations that once began with clarification were able to begin with intention instead.

This change did not eliminate the complexity of zoning, nor did it remove the need for professional judgment. What it did was make the complexity more navigable. When the rules are understood in the same way by everyone at the table, planners can concentrate on the deeper questions that drew them to their profession. Developers can approach a project with a clearer sense of possibility. Designers can move through the early stages of form finding without circling back to correct misunderstandings. Jurisdictions, many of which manage significant responsibilities with limited staff capacity, can create more space for long term planning and for the thoughtful stewardship of their communities.

As the shared understanding deepened, the nature of the conversations changed as well. Instead of focusing on whether a particular rule applied, people could focus on what the community hoped to achieve. Instead of debating how to interpret a regulation, they could explore how to design or plan in ways that reflected local goals. The work became less about decoding a text and more about imagining a future. These conversations had always been possible, but now they were easier to reach. The path to them was clearer.

UrbanForm’s mission has always centered on better buildings, cities, and environments. This mission is not served simply by speeding up access to information. It is served by supporting the people who make decisions about the built environment every day. Zoning may be the material we work with, but collaboration is the outcome we care about. A shared zoning language does more than reduce friction. It creates room for care, thoughtfulness, and creativity. It allows expertise to show up fully and without strain. It invites a sense of partnership among groups that often have to work together, yet rarely have the benefit of starting from a truly common understanding.

The future of planning and development will still require careful reasoning and difficult choices. It will require balancing community values with long term needs, and it will require sensitivity to the complexity of land, environment, and history. But when zoning becomes something that everyone can speak together rather than translate alone, the work becomes steadier. Ideas can move across sectors with more ease. Projects can evolve with more clarity. Communities can participate with more confidence.

A shared language does not guarantee agreement. What it guarantees is the ability to meet one another in the same place and see the same starting point. From there, collaboration becomes possible in a deeper and more meaningful way.

This is the promise we see in our work. Not a simpler version of cities, but a more connected one.