San Pablo Avenue Specific Plan is a form-based code. What is a form-based code?

By Steve Price

Passed in 2014 and championed by Councilmember Janet Abelson (who passed away in late 2022), El Cerrito’s form-based code shapes development along the length of San Pablo Avenue, as well as both BART stations and El Cerrito Plaza. An alternative to conventional land-use zoning, form-based coding is focused on shaping public space and giving back to pedestrians their rightful place in the built landscape. By comparison, conventional zoning is about designating where in a town housing, businesses, and industry are located; it color-codes a map for those uses but says almost nothing about the experiential quality of the places on the map. A form-based code returns the built landscape back to the scale of people walking and bicycling much as historic towns and cities did in the past.

With form-based codes, the public realm — whether a street, square, or plaza — is shaped by two basic sets of standards: public space (shown, at top) and building form (shown, above). Public-space standards typically include diagrams showing sidewalk sizes, road and lane widths, bicycle and transit lanes, and placement of trees and street lamps. Building-form standards, usually shown in diagrams, describe how architecture relates to public space, including parameters such as building orientation, the accessibility of entries from sidewalks, minimum and maximum window coverage on facades, and the height of facades in relation to the width of the street. Conventional zoning provides none of this. Form-based codes have been adopted by communities all over the world, some as big as Miami, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Calgary, and Abu Dhabi, and as small as towns of 100 people.

For a more in-depth, illustrated description of form-based codes, click here. To see the City of El Cerrito's San Pablo Avenue Specific Plan (a form-based code), click here.