Following the unanimous 2021 adoption of GVL2040, Greenville’s new comprehensive plan, the city retained CZB through a competitive process to completely rewrite its development code and update its engineering design and specifications manual. GVL2040 had set a clear but genuinely novel direction for how Greenville should develop, which meant the new code needed to be fundamentally different from the one it replaced. That raised a real question: how could the city modulate the impact of such a fundamental, rapid shift for both residents and the development community, rather than simply imposing it all at once?
Writing a new code in the abstract wasn’t enough. The new rules needed to be tested in real places before applying them citywide. The answer was to build a small-area planning process directly into the timeline of the new code’s development, rather than treating code writing as a separate, later step.
CZB developed five Character Development Plans in areas chosen to represent the full range of places across Greenville: residential neighborhoods, commercial corridors, and mixed-use nodes primed for more intense development. The five areas were the Buncombe + Stone Gateway District, the McAlister Square District, the Augusta Gateway District, the Greater Sullivan Neighborhood, and the North Laurens Corridor. Local stakeholder committees guided visioning and code-testing in each area, while additional public engagement extended the educational process to the broader community. The Character Development planning process connected the “what” and “why” already established in GVL2040 to the “how” of implementation in the new code, working through key issues like height, density, infill, and how new development should relate to public rights-of-way.
The five Character Development Plans directly informed Greenville’s new Development Code and its Engineering Design and Specifications Manual. The process was instrumental in testing the specific details that ultimately landed in both documents, giving the city’s new code and engineering manual, which play a critical role in shaping how new development happens in Greenville, a real-world foundation before they took effect citywide.
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