From a mid-century framework to a twenty-first-century tool.

What we did

ZoneCo supported Vienna's rewrite in partnership with local collaborators, work publicly acknowledged by project partners when the new code was adopted. The collaboration emphasized a user-friendly structure: plain-language purpose statements, consolidated use tables, and visuals to navigate districts and dimensional rules. The updated Chapter 18 is now hosted in Vienna's online code library and on the Town's Planning & Zoning pages. Vienna's map was also an early application of Development Pattern Districting.

Three priorities

• Context-sensitive standards calibrated to Vienna's established blocks, particularly along Maple Avenue, so height, massing, and frontage transition predictably near neighborhoods. Targeted flexibility in the Maple Avenue core focuses growth in walkable places while protecting nearby residential fabric.
• Streamlined procedures that replace a patchwork of discretionary steps with objective findings, clearer roles, and published timelines, making review more transparent and reducing uncertainty for routine, compliant projects.
• Small-business and housing feasibility through modernized use definitions and predictable approvals for low-impact, context-appropriate projects, including provisions for electric vehicle chargers and backyard chickens that had never been addressed.

Process

The Town maintained an accessible project hub for the code, map, and updates; routed residents to the current ordinance and interactive map; and kept permitting guidance current so applicants could understand how the new rules apply. Those implementation details, where to find the code, how to file, whom to contact, are critical to a rewrite's real-world success. The adopted package is a durable platform: the code can evolve through targeted amendments, on parking for example, without reopening its structure.

Vienna offers a model for peer communities: diagnose the pain points in the legacy code, translate the comprehensive plan into concise graphic standards, right-size review to focus discretion where it adds value, and build a living ordinance that staff and residents can actually use.