Tuesday, September 18 -- The critical work of listening, across all facets of the Taos community, begins in earnest today with a series of topic-specific meetings. This continues the momentum generated last evening as local residents, business owners, municipal officials and others braved the evening thunderstorms and turned out for the charrette’s opening presentation.

Events began with a 30-minute presentation by PlaceMakers principal Susan Henderson, during which the reasons behind the Master Plan and SmartCode initiative were made clear. The new plan and code will honor priorities set forth in the town’s Vision 2020 Plan and guide future development in the spirit of Taos’ much-admired history and culture.

“Taos has been charming people for hundreds of years,” Henderson told the Monday-night audience. “People come here and never want to leave.”

The SmartCode is designed to accommodate -- and replicate in new development -- the character of beloved places. But coding a unique community like Taos is no cookie-cutter proposition. Which is where citizens and their leaders come in. “Every town is different,” said Henderson. “It’s your job to help us define the details. We need you to help us shape the code that will shape the future of Taos.”

Given Taos’ tri-cultural history pre-dating the formation of the United States, this particular coding effort will be both challenging and exhilarating, “We’ll throw out many of the usual measuring methods,’” said Henderson. “This could be the most creative and innovative SmartCode ever produced.”

After the opening presentation, audience members divided into six informal discussion groups to talk about specific areas to be addressed by the SmartCode. Citizens offered their analyses and suggested approaches that might make their neighborhoods better places to live. Their perspectives will immediately find their way into PlaceMaker designs to be showcased as works-in-progress for Wednesday night’s mid-term “pin-up” report.

Earlier in the day, the team joined Long Range Planner Matthew Foster for a guided tour around the town and its environs. The goal was to ensure a comparable understanding of Taos’ built identity, and the physical details that contribute to it, for everyone involved. This included everything from street widths and building frontages to fencing types and use of agricultural land.

“It’s amazing,” noted Henderson, who lived in Taos in 1996 and 97. “These details, and how they fit together, reflect hundreds of years of local culture. If ever there was a place where character and identity have been intertwined forever, this is it.”

“If anything, this week’s charrette is a big step towards keeping it that way.”

In the afternoon, the team heard provocative presentations from a group of University of New Mexico landscape architecture students. The students offered their take on layers of Taos history, culture, and landscape that can play roles in future planning -- and, in the process, conveyed a tremendous amount of details and specificity to the team.

“It was refreshing to hear from them,” said PlaceMakers planner Howard Blackson. “Much of their work is directly related to what we’re doing here. It really gives us an advantage.”

The students’ approach mirrored the “Transect” orientation of the SmartCode that will be customized for Taos. Drawn from ecosystem studies, Transect analyses view the landscape in sections appropriate for animal and plant habitat. So instead of conventional zoning that separates areas according to use, the SmartCode delineates “T-zones” according to appropriate development intensity (see the FAQ for more information). It’s an approach that allows for environmental overlays such as the ones produced by the U. of N.M. students.

Perhaps elements of their work will show up in some of the emerging PlaceMakers’ studies. Check back daily to find out.