Newton On-Call Urban Design: Northland, Riverside Station & Zoning Redesign - Newton, MA

Urban Design

City of Newton

Dating back to 2018, Form + Place has been working with the City of Newton, MA as an On-Call Urban Design Consultant. Early efforts included reviewing the City’s ongoing Zoning Redesign project and helping to lead a series of forums that engaged the local design community to test new zoning criteria being proposed for village and residential districts. In rewriting Newton’s zoning ordinance to become “contextually-based,” the City has been hoping to move away from Floor Area Ratio [F.A.R.] as a driving factor in determining the appropriate scale of development on a given site. The current F.A.R.-based language has led to the construction of numerous new “monster homes” that are out of scale with their surrounding context. In addition to organizing the design forums, Form + Place produced test case studies on key sites to help reinforce the validity of proposed dimensional criteria.

Over the past few years, Form + Place has continued to work closely with the Planning & Development Department to provide peer review services for two 1 million+ square foot mixed-use developments – Northland and Riverside Station. A key part of our involvement in each of these major developments has been the crafting of Design Guidelines to help define the urban design and architectural qualities of these complex projects. The Design Guidelines process involved extensive outreach, collaboration and negotiations with the development teams, neighborhood stakeholders, the City Council’s Land Use Committee and planning staff. In both instances, a unique set of Guidelines were adopted, leading to the approval of each development – Northland in 2020 and Riverside most recently in the summer of 2021.