Don't face your butt to the street

Source: flickr.com

One frustrating nuance of land use planning is when a business wishes to situate their new structure in a manner that detracts from the adjacent street’s aesthetics by facing the primary entrance away from the street.  This most often tends to occur on outlots or on commercial parcels that get split years after the original occupant was constructed, but I have also seen it take place on single use parcels too.

Rather than facing the new structure so that it fronts toward the street, the builder/owner/developer may propose to front it at a 90 degree angle to the street or face it inward on a loop road. This leaves those passing by along the street with a grand view of the butt side (rear facade) of the building.  As a result, the streetscape could end up with a largely blank, uninteresting wall, or worse yet, the service entrance and loading docks. This does nothing to enhance visual aesthetics or placemaking.

Source: pioneerplanning.com

So, what does an urban planner do to limit and/or prevent the blank canyonization of the streetscape. Here are a few suggestions – please feel free to forward/suggest more.

• Adopt a building facade ordinance or a form-based code.
• Require “accessible public entrances” on all street sides of a building. Emergency, security, service, and employees entrances do now count as “accessible public entrances.”
• Provide a “reasonable” sign incentive for each additional “accessible public entrance” either in sign area or number of wall signs.  Be careful not to give away the farm.
• If an entrance cannot be incorporated on the streetside, require architectural, streetscape, and landscape details such as windows, columns, street trees, and similar features in your code in order to soften the building’s scale and appearance from the street.
• Place restrictions on entrance siting in the conditions of approval for special use permits.

Source: landscapeonline.com

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