City Planning Services

We meet you where you are. Through fun, active, and celebratory engagement, we capture your community's story, laying the groundwork for effective community visioning. We build community support around goals and aspirations to create a clear vision that ensures understanding and incorporation of local preferences in our comprehensive plans. This foundational work is essential for confirming community support and is integral to our approach to developing small area plans tailored to your needs and even utilizing DNA analysis to better understand community dynamics.

DNA analysis is the process of measuring the physical and numerical values that define a place. By extracting these values, community visioning efforts can better quantify the components that create the special locations cherished by locals. Utilizing these standards is essential for crafting comprehensive plans and small area plans that effectively reflect and return to local preferences.

The “industry-standard” Comprehensive Plan, built upon award-winning documents, is suitable for certain cities but can be quite daunting for smaller communities. Many firms utilize a “boilerplate” template that fails to consider the unique needs, resources, staffing levels, or sophistication of different locales.

At Simplecity.Design, we adopt a targeted approach for every project to ensure the specific goals and objectives of each city are met. Our plans adhere to the definition of a Comprehensive Plan and align with the standards set by the Texas Local Government Code. 

For our smaller cities, we emphasize community visioning by developing a simple, illustrative document that encapsulates the essence of their community. This includes a beautifully written vision statement and a future plan that integrates the natural setting, built environment, and cultural DNA analysis to preserve authenticity and local preferences.

Our Comprehensive Plans are crafted to empower the community by helping them understand their challenges, motivating them with potential solutions, and instilling a sense of urgency to act. Additionally, we support small area plans to further refine local strategies.

Why not break the rules? They are already broken. Development standards, grounded in Euclidean zoning, necessitate Anywhere, USA to be constructed. These approaches often isolate populations through a segregation of land uses, ultimately leading to expensive, fragile, and placeless communities. 

Through our national award-winning approach, which incorporates community visioning and comprehensive plans, our codes utilize established DNA analysis to shape standards that ensure understanding and integration of local preferences, guiding future growth. Reward your community with easy-to-use, graphically illustrated, and fiscally sustainable outcomes. 

Our processes identify gaps, overlaps, and arbitrary rules to create consistency and predictability for staff, policymakers, and the development community, particularly through small area plans.

Humanize it. Small area plans play a crucial role in community visioning by connecting people to places. Often overlooked and underutilized, these small area plans serve as mini comprehensive plans tailored for specific areas within a community that are ripe for development, redevelopment, and establishing connections. Simplecity.Design's approach incorporates various tools, including urban design solutions, the integration of the public/private realm, and DNA analysis for building scale models, all aimed at creating lovely, walkable, and thriving destinations.