Master planning establishes a cohesive vision for a site, neighborhood, or city district. Accounting for land use, infrastructure, and zoning regulations, it outlines potential building projects and sets overarching design guidelines.
In recent years, we’ve aided several clients with master planning efforts and have guided the phased development of large sites. These plans have helped ensure consistent and intentional development, leading to identifiable destinations.
If you are planning a large-scale development, master planning services can help. This article will explain master planning and an architect’s role. It will also describe what you can achieve through master planning, using examples from a few recent Neumann Monson projects.
What is Master Planning?
Whether a business park, residential neighborhood, or a mixed-use district, large-scale developments fill out gradually. A single developer may acquire the land and begin implementing infrastructure, but others may build individual projects over time. It is not always clear when or how construction will take shape.
A master plan helps convey the original intent as development occurs, promoting cohesion between projects and ensuring a consistent identity. In addition to many other factors, a plan establishes building locations, their potential size, use, and heights, and how buildings will interact with the streetscape.
The Market District's master plan outlines potential building locations.
Master planning is a collaborative process, bringing expertise from disciplines like landscape architecture and civil engineering. Depending on the client’s needs, the master plan may lay out street sizes, parking requirements, pedestrian walkways and bike lanes, screening requirements, and landscaping and hardscape elements.
In the end, construction is not haphazard. There is a clear path forward, helping ensure the site or neighborhood maintains a clear identity and sense of place.
How Does an Architect Assist with Master Planning?
While master planning involves input from various experts, architects play a key role. Their job is to consider the site from the building level and how different structures will interact. Below, we’ll discuss a few ways their expertise aids master planning.
1. Visioning and Goal Setting
Architects can help property owners, developers, and municipalities form an overarching vision for a neighborhood or site. In early planning sessions, they act as a facilitator, gathering input from various stakeholders.
The most successful master plans start by engaging the community. Architects can lead engagement by asking questions, listening to residents, and synthesizing their wants and needs. Surveys and activities like visioning workshops can deepen your understanding of the community.
This input can lead to a list of overarching goals. At the Market District in Des Moines, one of the primary goals was to create a connected, pedestrian-oriented neighborhood centered around people spaces.
This goal influenced many ideas outlined in the master plan, including narrower streets, minimal setbacks, pedestrian gathering places, public art facilitation, and ground-level retail in new buildings. At Neumann Monson, our role was to create architectural design standards to support these overarching goals and comply with local guidelines.
These standards illustrate the importance of scale in creating a pedestrian-oriented experience. Diagrams show how city blocks and buildings can be manipulated to create more active spaces.
One approach outlined in the standards is datum lines for buildings. A datum is a horizontal plane that helps control the height of new development. A building either stops at this height or steps back if going higher, creating a unified street frontage and a more human-scale experience.
Datums help preserve a pedestrian-oriented experience in the Market District.
Similarly, the design standards recommend carving into facades to break down building scales. For example, it suggests using balconies, texture, and articulation (changes in plane) to mimic the look and feel of downtown walk-up buildings.
These guidelines developed from early discussions about the developers’ goals and their focus on active, pedestrian-oriented streets. A clear vision helped develop an appropriate design framework with clear guidelines available for future developers.
2. Interpreting Local Regulations
Architects can also help navigate and interpret local regulations, zoning laws, and building codes. On a typical master plan, your architect will perform a site analysis and determine how regulations will impact its development.
Codes and regulations inform and guide the site’s use, future buildings’ sizes and heights, and the buildings’ relationship to the street. Setback requirements, for example, guide how close the building can be to the property line and the primary and secondary means of approach.
Together, these regulations will shape the overall size and character of buildings on site. Outlining requirements in the master plan helps ensure future development complies.
Beyond size, height, and setbacks, codes may also regulate building aesthetics. Some cities have form-based codes, limiting a building’s material palette. Others may specify view corridors to ensure iconic buildings, landscape features, or monuments remain visible.
The Market District's master plan preserves view corridors to the State Capital.
Your architect should work to comply with these goals and honor the city’s desires while forming a vision for your project. Ideally, there is room to accommodate the needs of you and the city, and your designer should collaborate with the local Authority Having Jurisdiction (AHJ).
Although they can feel restrictive, form-based codes are in place to minimize haphazard development and maintain quality. If your vision does not align with these codes, your architect should communicate with the AHJ and advocate for an exception. Cities may be willing to grant a change to regulations if the change is deemed acceptable and the overall project aligns with the city’s goals.
3. Setting Standards for Future Development
Master planning can occur at various scales. While adopting a broader urban planning perspective, architects can also consider the relationship between different buildings.
In some cases, clients may request design guidelines for future developments. These guidelines establish the site’s look and feel by highlighting building setbacks, materials, and façade fenestration options.
While providing developers freedom, design guidelines promote cohesion between buildings. For example, in the Kettlestone Development, developers can use flat, pitched, or gabled roofs but pitched and gabled roofs are suggested to slope toward the street-facing and rear façade—not side to side. This seemingly minor detail helps create consistency between all developments.
Ideally, the guidelines will help tell a larger story about the site or neighborhood and create an identifiable destination. For example, material options for Des Moines’ Market District reflect the area’s industrial history.
This redevelopment project seeks to revitalize an area dominated by factories at the turn of the 20th century and later by nondescript commercial buildings and lots. To ensure new developments would harmonize with the existing structures and allude to the area’s history, the guidelines suggest robust materials like brick, Corten Steel, concrete, masonry, and architectural metal panels.
The Market District's materials allude to the area's industrial history.
Although multiple developers may contribute to the district’s growth, buildings will ideally have a similar, compatible look. A durable palette will acknowledge the area’s unique history and help distinguish it from other parts of the city.
Establishing a Sense of Place
Any developer, property owner, or municipality should aim for an attractive, vibrant area where people want to live, shop, and visit. A district’s success largely depends on its layout, streetscape, and how buildings interact and relate. Every detail—from the sidewalk widths to landscaping to building heights—has an impact.
A master plan helps ensure development is not haphazard. It lays out potential building locations, specifies their relative sizes and heights, and sets design guidelines. An architect’s role is to ask questions, identify goals, interpret codes, and develop concepts to create an overarching vision for the area.
Ultimately, master planning can help form or reinforce a community identity and foster connections between people and the places they share. This idea is known as placemaking, and it’s where architecture and urban planning meet. To learn the best practices for creating a lively destination, read about placemaking and its importance.