About PAS Memo

Today's planners need to stay informed about innovative strategies and techniques for a wide range of planning topics.

PAS Memo delivers this information to you. It highlights current cutting-edge topics — such as green roofs and climate change adaptation — while providing the latest findings and best practices in classic planning areas such as stormwater management and housing affordability.

PAS Memo is written by practicing planners and experts in the field eager to share their expertise through illuminating case studies. Each article provides a list of links to online resources for planners who want to dig deeper.

PAS Memo is available to Planning Advisory Service subscribers only.

Current Issue

January/February 2012

Delivering Better Plans

By John Houseal, AICP, and Devin Lavigne, AICP

To be successful, plans need to inspire and create excitement within a community. To do that, they must be more than just a hundred pages of text with a few obligatory maps.

In the past, a plan would sit on bookshelves in the back offices of City Hall. Today, they are highly visible and accessible, posted online for everyone to see and use. As such, they must be inspirational, easy to use, and easy to understand by everyone in the community.

This PAS Memo presents an overview of some of the trends and issues that are affecting plan making; provides considerations to draft better text; and reviews tips for producing better graphics to help planners improve the maps, charts, illustrations, plans, and documents they produce.

Read the full article