Environmental Planning for Site Development

A Manual for Sustainable Local Planning and Design

Anne Beer, Cathy Higgins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135920449
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Environmental planning forms the basis of all site development decisions and deals with the factors that must be considered before a site plan can be drawn up. Environmental Planning for Site Development emphasizes the man/nature interface and explains how nature limits and controls what can happen on every piece of land. The text is clearly set out and will help the reader understand exactly what information is needed for a site planning proposal. The book includes a live case study to demonstrate how GIS systems are now assisting in the design and decision process as communities increasingly participate in local decisions. (Local Agenda 21)

Part One
Site Planning

This part defines what is meant by site planning and outlines the process involved in producing a site plan. The first chapter indicates the scope of environmental planning for site development, shows it to be a multidisciplinary activity and lists in summary form the work to be undertaken by environmental planners. The second chapter outlines some fundamental principles of environmental planning as they relate to the type of problem tackled by those involved in site planning.

1
What is site planning?

This chapter shows that making decisions about what goes where on an area of land is a very common activity but one that has to be undertaken with care, if the results of the decision-making process are not to be to the detriment of the environment. It explains the advantages of a systematic approach to planning a site and indicates the vast range of environmental, social and economic factors which should have a bearing on the decision-making process in relation to site planning. It indicates the range of professional expertise available to tackle the problem-identification and problem-solving required by the site planning process.

What does sustainable site planning entail?

THE OVERALL LAND-USE PLANNING PROCESS

Site planning is an integral part of the land-use planning process; it determines the detailed layout of an area of land so that it functions effectively in relation to a given range of land uses on the site and others around it. It occurs directly before or is part of the detailed design process, depending on the complexity and scale of the site.

In the overall planning process site planning occurs after the strategic planning has taken place and after the land use has been decided in relation to social, economic and environmental needs.

Site planning is about working out the detail of what should happen on a given area of land, how it should happen and what it will cost to implement and manage the project on that area of land.

WHEN IS IT NECESSARY TO PRODUCE A SITE PLAN?

A site plan is needed:

1. whenever it is proposed to change the use of an area of land or build on all or part of it;
2. whenever it is proposed to change the way in which an area of land and its associated landscapes is managed and maintained.

Site plans are required for all developments involving the construction of buildings or other engineering structures:

• housing developments
• industrial developments
• commercial developments
• recreational developments
• communications developments.

Site plans are not only required when building operations are proposed; they are needed when it is planned that any part of the external environment should be used in a different way or for a different purpose, or that the land is to be managed differently. This includes:

• housing rehabilitation
• industrial rehabilitation
• commercial area rehabilitation
• reclamation of derelict land
• afforestation
• additional or improved parks and open spaces
• changing landscape management practices.

WHO NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT SITE PLANNING?

Anybody involved in making decisions about land-use change on specific sites and involved in considering such change in relation to environmental, social and economic factors needs to understand how the physical and natural environment constrains what man can do on an area of land. Not everybody needs to know about it in the same depth, but the more that those involved understand the principles underlying the site planning process, the more likely it is that nature can be respected when making proposals to develop areas of land.

The process of site planning and its basic principles is relevant to landuse planning and environmental design in every continent and culture. It is only the detail that will be different. The process described here has developed out of experience of site planning in the English-speaking world, but there is no reason why the fundamental principles cannot be adapted by a reader to other situations, provided that the locally prevailing culture/nature relationship is thoroughly studied.

In Britain, it is the site planning process which provides the basic information needed by an applicant in order to obtain permission to develop through the development control system. As all development on, under, or above an area of land in Britain can only happen with official approval, this means that some form of site planning has to be initiated for large numbers of sites each year. Anyone involved with changing the use of an area of land and spending money to develop a site, even developers who see no need to employ professional advisers to guide their projects, will be involved in at least a rudimentary form of site planning because of the development control system. Such developers might not term their operation ‘site planning’, but even if their work is restricted only to a concern for the financial viability or profitability of the proposed development and to obtaining just enough information for the planning process, it is still site planning.

To carry out a proper financial appraisal, developers must collate and assess information about the site, its environment and the people who will ultimately live, work, or play on the land. For this reason the site planning process should not be seen as an unnecessarily expensive extra. It is, in fact, a part of the process which all public and private developers have to go through to assess the financial viability of a scheme.

The site planning process aims to be more consistent in its cover of the environmental issues which should determine the detailed layout and design of a site, than the relatively random approach so often taken by landowners and developers. The process also differs from the developers’ approach to decision-making in that it attempts to look at site planning in relation to the interests of society as a whole as well as those of the developer, when determining what should and should not happen on the land.

Site planning is not a process devised to ‘stop development happening’ or to ‘slow it down’, as some politicians are wont to believe. On the contrary it aims to enable a development to happen, but with the least possible adverse effects on the environment as a whole. Only when the environmental or social impacts are totally negative does the process enable the developer and the planners to reach an informed decision that the project should not be allowed to take place for environmental reasons.

The emphasis of site planning is on environmental issues, but any consideration of environmental factors is also linked to other factors, involving as it does economic and social issues. However, site planners have to be pragmatic and recognize that it is often these other factors which hold most sway with the developers and politicians involved with the land-use development programmes. Very often their main interest is in meeting certain financial targets. Despite the increased awareness of the importance of the natural environment, factors such as fear of wasting money or not making enough to please shareholders can still determine the developer’s final decision about a project more readily than environmental concerns. Encouraging developers and politicians to realize that economic disadvantage to individuals and society can result from a failure to take proper account of the physical and natural environment is, therefore, an important part of the site planner’s task. Explaining this to developers and politicians can cause a radical change in attitude towards site planning.

Site planning can make money for a developer by ensuring that unnecessarily expensive development solutions are not chosen. For instance, developers who fail to have a thorough survey of the physical conditions of a site can inadvertently position buildings in locations where the soil bearing capacity is low and allocate areas of good bearing capacity as public open space—resulting in an unnecessary need for expensive pile driven supports for the buildings. Or, because of the lack of a proper site assessment, they can fail to recognize that the existing landscape could become a high-quality recreational environment with only slight modification and instead spend vast sums developing a new landscape.

It is not just the direct costs of development that site planning can help to reduce; it can also help to reduce the long-term management costs associated with operating on a site. For instance, the development of the site using a particular layout could result in very high energy consumption to keep the buildings warm in winter, whereas if the development were carried out differently, based on understanding the link between the local climate of the site, its landform and the distribution of vegetation, it would be possible to minimize those running costs.

SITE PLANNING AND THE COST OF DEVELOPMENT

Calculating the costs is an important part of the site planning process both in terms of actual cost to the developer of alternative solutions and the costs to society which result from the proposed development. Costs to society are incurred, for instance, through:

1. the need to provide an adequate infrastructure;
2. the extra work which has to be carried out to protect adjacent natural resources;
3. the need to create new landscapes because of damage to the visual resources caused by the development;
4. the loss of cultural resources;
5. the need to relocate people whose lives are disturbed by an unacceptable land-use change, for instance one which increases the local noise level.

SITE PLANNING CAN SAVE MONEY

Properly conducted, the site planning process can often indicate that more effective and cheaper approaches to site layout and design are possible and, therefore, it can be used as a way of increasing the profitability of individual projects or even making them possible where previously they had seemed uneconomic. The process is of particular value when it incorporates consideration of the long-term management cost of different layout and design solutions, for these too have an important impact on the financial viability of any project for the financier.

The development of any site entails capital costs for site preparation and the implementation of the project, maintenance costs and site management costs. For most sites the viability of development can be judged only if all these financial aspects are considered, not just initial capital costs.

WHY A SPECIAL PLANNING PROCESS?

If site planning is deciding what should happen where on an area of land, why was there any need to develop a special site planning process? The reason was that specialists in land-use and landscape planning came to realize that a process was needed which would allow all concerned to think systematically through the whole range of issues that relate to deciding what should happen on an area of land. Without such a system there was a danger that the problem would only be understood from the particular viewpoint of the person charged with producing the site plan.

The site planning process allows us to think through all the problems likely to be associated with developing a site or changing its use. It is the complexity of the man/environment relationship which creates the need to look at the interactions systematically. The land itself is complex, each area of land having developed to its present state through natural environmental change and, more recently, through modification by man’s past and present actions. People are complex in the way they use land, with each different culture behaving in a way which results in a different relationship between people and the land.

It has taken until recent decades to recognize that people cannot exist without nature; that our activities are inextricably a part of nature. We now know that we are capable through our land-use and land management actions of irreparably ruining man’s habitat and we have begun to recognize that all our land-use developments must be carried out within the constraints set by the physical and natural environment, if we are to avoid further damage to it. We have also begun to recognize that we can intervene to put right at least some of our past environmental mistakes.

If the fundamental relationship between man and nature is ignored by landowners and land planners and managers it results in:

• at best: costs to society to put right mistakes
• at worst: major environmental and/or economic disasters which may have long-term effects.

Since every change on the surface of the land has an impact, however small, on the environment, every change has to be thought through carefully by the proposer, the developer and those charged with land-use planning. To fail to do so can result in unnecessary economic loss as well as environmental and social problems.

It is to reduce the apparently haphazard occurrence of environmental problems and to guide us on how to repair past damage that the site planning process has been developed. It aims to act as a check by identifying possible problems with new developments and by indicating the way in which the potential of a site can be developed without undue cost to society (costs of counteracting environmental damage) and to the individual (costs associated with poor or mistaken use of the local features and resources).

Site planning goes beyond the stage normally identified by the term ‘Environmental Impact Assessment’ in that it aims to come up with the Site Use and Layout Plan and is inextricably related to the design of the site. Any site plan produced by the process will be based on the intention of doing least damage to the physical and natural environment, while providing adequate environmental settings for the people who will be affected by the new development. It is about sustainable environmental planning and so provides information for Environmental Impact Assessment and for planning permission.

Why site planning is multi-disciplinary

TYPES OF SITE WHICH NEED A SITE PLAN

Site plans are produced for all types and sizes of site, from individual site plans for areas as small as a house and garden, to large housing and industrial estates or recreational areas covering several hundred hectares. The principles are the same—the level of work and detail are not.

In many circumstances the production of a site plan is inextricably linked with the detailed design of a site, but the more complex a site the more likely that the site planning and site design stage will be separated and even carried out by different people.

Each site plan will be different as it involves a different emphasis. The skill of the site planner or the site planning team li...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Part One Site Planning
• Part Two The Site Inventory
• Part Three Spaces for People
• Part Four The Site Plan
• Part Five Sustainable Urban Environmental Planning
• Appendix A: Local Agenda 21 and sustainable urban environments