Take any great place that people love to visit. You know, those lively tourist haunts from Nantucket to San Francisco. Or those red hot neighborhoods from Seattle’s Capital Hill to Miami Beach’s Art Deco district. Or those healthy downtowns from Portland, Oregon to Chicago, Illinois to Charleston, South Carolina. What do they all have in common?

The mix of uses that gives them life are presently outlawed by zoning in virtually every city and town in all 50 states.

Crisis offers opportunity. With real estate in a freefall, there is an opportunity to lay the foundation for a more prosperous and sustainable American landscape.

If only there is the vision and political will.

Scrapping zoning codes is the single most significant change that can be made in every town and city in America. It would aid economic development, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, foster healthier lifestyles, reduce dependence on foreign oil, protect open space and wildlife habitats, and reduce wasteful government spending.

Zoning is a legacy of Herbert Hoover. As Commerce Secretary, he championed the “Standard Zoning Enabling Act” to address “the moral and social issues that can only be solved by a new conception of city building.” In 1926, the Supreme Court upheld zoning to protect health and safety by “excluding from residential areas the confusion and danger of fire, contagion and disorder which in greater or less degree attach to the location of store, shops and factories.” The quite sensible idea that people shouldn’t live next to steel mills was used to justify a system of “zones” to isolate uses that had lived in harmony for centuries.

Under zoning, new neighborhoods were segregated by income, and commerce was torn asunder from both customers and workers. Timeless ways of creating great places were ruthlessly outlawed. The sprawl spawned by zoning spread from sea to shining sea.

Almost everyone admits the environmental and social devastation caused by sprawl. Yet it remains the law. What’s been lacking is the tool for producing great places instead of bleak, auto-dependent landscapes. If “zoning” is the DNA of sprawl the coding that endlessly replicates the bleak landscape of autotopia, then what is the DNA of livable communities?

It is found in timeless ways of building, updated for the 21st Century, including the need to accommodate cars. It regulates incompatible uses without the absurdities of conventional zoning. It is calibrated for new buildings to contribute to their context and to the larger goal of making a great place. It does so primarily by regulating the form of buildings, since that is what determines the long-neglected public realm of streets and sidewalks. It does that by regulating setbacks, heights and the physical character of buildings. For example, a form-based code could protect the existing scale of a neighborhood from the “teardowns” of traditional homes for replacement by McMansions–or facilitate the evolution of an auto-oriented commercial strip to a mix of uses, including residential and/or office over retail.

Called “form-based codes” or “smart codes,” this alternative framework for shaping great places exists, and it’s quietly spreading.

Where it’s been tried, it’s been a success. Seaside, Florida, the poster town for “new urbanism,” was “coded” rather than zoned, and ended up on the cover of Time magazine. In 2003, Petaluma, California scrapped its zoning regulations and adopted a new code for 400 underdeveloped acres in their Downtown, producing more than a quarter billion dollars in new investment. Now cities as diverse as Miami, Buffalo, Tulsa and La Jolla are pursuing “form-based codes.”

Unlike zoning, “form-based coding” is not a “one-size fits all” solution. The rules for form in a dense urban center are distinctly different from those for a predominantly residential suburban neighborhood. In each case, the form and character of buildings are “calibrated” to achieve a cohesive and complimentary sense of place.

Still, widespread adoption waits upon the widespread recognition that the time for reform has come. The real estate meltdown provides that wake-up call. The model is broken. Financing generic products (class A office; suburban housing tract; grocery-anchored strip center; business park, etc.) through globally marketable securities has become radioactive. By the time supply and demand right themselves, the financial and economic unsustainability of sprawl will be laid bare.

Of course, one can never underestimate what historian Barbara Tuchman called “the march of folly.” Perhaps in the interest of “stimulus” to the moribund economy, we will be willing to spend trillions more to subsidize sprawl. But in the end, as economist Herbert Stein pointed out, “That which cannot go on forever, won’t.”

Before that day comes, we can save untold environmental, economic and social damage by the widespread adoption of coding that respects human scale, restores the proximity of complimentary uses, and repairs the damage done to the American landscape and our rich (but abandoned) tradition of creating fine neighborhoods, towns and cities.

Scrap zoning. Adopt coding. Legalize the art of making great places that people cherish, that produce economic value, and that leave a lighter environmental footprint on the land.

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In his first press conference as president-elect, Barack Obama acknowledged, “Some of the choices that we make are going to be difficult…it is not going to be easy for us to dig ourselves out of the hole that we are in.”

In this crisis, the “change we need” is to invest in a sustainable economy for our future, rather than borrowing to sustain our current economy. Here’s how the new Administration can help us dig out of the hole we’re in:

• Green business. In his new global survey of America’s peril and potential, Hot, Flat and Crowded, Thomas Friedman calls “green” the “new red white and blue.” Obama has pledged to create “green jobs” through alternative energy. But in the decade ahead, every single job in the American economy will need to go “green,” by ruthless pursuit of less waste and more sustainable and productive business practices. For the private sector to succeed, federal policies on taxes, regulations, research, purchasing and grant-making must all be reformed to promote green practices, rather than stifle them.

• Smart Growth. The suburban, auto-dominated landscape of the past 50 years won’t work for a post-peak oil, post-carbon America. Alternate fuels aren’t enough, nor is transit compatible with sprawl. The Congress for the New Urbanism, headed by former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist, has revived traditional town and city building to emphasize mixed-use, transit-oriented design at every scale of development from neighborhood to metropolis. Rep. Earl Blumenauer from Portland, Oregon has emerged as the leading national leader for this movement, rapidly being adopted by cities and states across America.

• Regionalism. In a June speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Obama identified metro regions as the engines of global growth. Denver, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, Portland, Chattanooga and St. Louis have emerged as models for metro/suburban collaboration. Obama also embraced the social equity dimension of regionalism, to ensure inner cities will benefit from collaborative efforts to improve education, reinvest in older communities and create globally competitive high-wage, high-value jobs.

• Transportation. In 1991, Senator Pat Moynihan spearheaded the landmark ISTEA transportation law. But instead of matching the investment by other advanced economies in high-speed rail and public transit, the Clinton administration let highway expansion continue to dominate federal spending. The Bush Administration failed to even keep up on infrastructure maintenance, so that sprawl continues to fuel oil consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The new administration will need to start where ISTEA left off to rebuild our goods–and people-moving capacity on an environmentally and economically sustainable model.

• Human capital. Education is the key to restoring American competitiveness. Mayors around the country have emulated Chicago’s Richard Daley’s drive to rebuild inner city schools to restore America’s great cities as engines of new wealth creation, rather than gentrified havens for young professionals amongst crime-ridden slums. We need a national commitment to human capital to reduce the underclass, assimilate immigrants, and provide the workforce that can outperform the hard-working offshore workforce in the economy of the future.

• Innovation. Obama’s popularity in Silicon Valley mirrors his embrace of venture capital investment in American jobs. The Japanese failed to shake off their decade-long slump because they remained tied to “pork barrel” public works stimulation of their economy. Harnessing private investment and entrepreneurship to rebuild America’s cities, older suburbs and essential infrastructure is essential not only to economic success, but to political success as well. Let’s take the huge brainpower and speculative investment that’s been devoted to financing consumer debt and redeploy it to rebuild America’s cities and productive economy.

• New Orleans. Of all George Bush’s failures, the cruelest was his empty promise to rebuild New Orleans. The most hopeful counter-point to those wasted years would be to use the New Orleans region as a model for a green economy that puts people back to work in jobs that create wealth instead of consuming it. Instead of the default choice of tourism, gambling, and decay, New Orleans should rebuild around enterprise and trade, with first-class schools and a sustainable infrastructure.

Reshaping of the American landscape and economy won’t be easy. “Change we can believe in” must look beyond Washington and its stale wedge issues. It must harness local movements, as well as mayors, council members, governors and state legislators, advancing innovative new models throughout our federalist system. Obama carries the unique advantage of having been a community organizer and a state legislator. He can be the model and the inspiration for a broad-based movement for change.

The new administration will be a time of harsh testing, for Washington and for the country. Our nation is too geographically diverse, our economy too gargantuan, for Washington to chart a single course. But investing in sustainability instead of spending on consumption could have a profound impact on the shape of American metropolitan regions and the communities they contain. That’s “the change we need.”

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