Guiding Plan Implementation With Degree of Change
PAS Memo — July-August 2021
By John Zeanah, FAICP
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In 2019, the City of Memphis completed the Memphis 3.0 Comprehensive Plan, the city's first comprehensive plan since 1981 and guide for a new direction of growth. The headline of the vision statement is brief, yet bold: "Build up, not out."
This comprehensive plan vision statement was memorable and effective. But while the public embraced the plan's vision, it led to questions. How far up? And where? And when? Memphis's planners used an emerging tool called "Degree of Change" to answer these questions and organize the plan's implementation and the various actors engaged.
Using the Degree of Change approach in the comprehensive plan helps to address the plan's limitations, provides clarity and strategy to the pace of change desired or expected from the plan, and focuses the process of implementing the plan to address questions of where, when, and how.
This issue of PAS Memo makes the case for using Degree of Change and illustrates the most effective ways to apply this concept to the comprehensive plan by discussing in depth the experience of Memphis.
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About the Author
John Zeanah, FAICP
John Zeanah is an urban planner and policy strategist whose career spans leadership roles in planning, housing, and community development. He is principal and owner of Interval, LLC, a planning and policy advisory firm, and previously served as the director of Planning and Development in Memphis for over seven years. John has been an early champion of building code reform to support housing supply and small-scale development, authoring two local building code amendments and Tennessee state legislation reforming building code. He also serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Building in North America.