Zoning and Landscape Laws Course Offered Online

LASN contacted Buck Abbey recently to see what's new in landscape ordinances. Buck Abbey is an associate professor of landscape architecture at Louisiana State University and author of the 1998 book U.S. Landscape Ordinances: An Annotated Reference Handbook.

His latest venture is Zoning and Landscape Laws, an online study course offered through the regional planning department of Ohio State University. ?EUR??,,????'?????<

The course description notes that landscape and tree regulations are perhaps the fastest growing area of zoning law, a result of the environmental movement of the 1970s, new urbanism and conservation planning in the 1980s and smart growth in the 1990s.

The course teaches the green law aspects of zoning, what a landscape code is, the basic vocabulary of landscape codes, how landscape, tree and clearing laws are structured, and how they are administered. Follow-up courses will be on the geography of development sites, technical code language and how to draft landscape regulations into zoning law.

The course fee is $75. For more information, visit https://knowlton.osu.edu/ped/landscape.htm. You can also email Jennifer Evans-Cowley ped@knowlton.osu.edur or call (614) 247-7479.

P.S. Prof. Abbey has several other projects: He's working on another book, this one on municipal landscape law; a two-year research contract with EPA on onsite storm water management principles and practices (he'll write a model landscape code for them that incorporates storm water as a major code component); and a proposal before the EPA to define and design green parking lots in keeping with the U.S. Green Building Council principles.

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