Group has designs on a new look for city

City planners, having pushed through years of arduous and often turbulent efforts to set the vision for Glendale’s future development, are now focused on making sure those policies translate into a landscape that people actually want to be a part of.

It is not enough to set height and density limits, to develop a downtown mobility plan, snatch up open space and historic landmarks and then allow developers to build according to the status quo, city planners said.

Now that development parameters have been set, Glendale Planning Director Hassan Haghani’s new “design studio” is in place to make sure that as the city becomes more dense, it does so with engaging design, concessions to the pedestrian and protection for the past.

The new focus is a departure for the Planning Department, which for decades has been consumed with the minutiae of zoning codes and guidelines for single-family homes, hillside development and setting the guide for downtown infill.

With that largely out of the way, city planners now get to manage how developers build within the new boundaries.

“We’re actually creating an institutional change in the way we do planning,” Haghani said.

That means allowing for architectural innovation and reducing the chances for “inferior design,” he added.

The design studio is the new filter through which proposed developments will now have to pass, a design catch-all that most “built-out” cities in California are only now beginning to form.

When Haghani took over the Planning Department last year, it was at a time when the city was in design flux.

The drumbeat of homeowners associations against Glendale’s two Design Review Boards was loud and steady, the draft hillside ordinance and historic districting process were in full bloom, and now-Mayor John Drayman had just been elected to the City Council with a mandate to overhaul the design review process for single-family homes.

Since then, the Planning Department has absorbed the sweeping overhaul of the single-family home design review process, a reorganization of various planning-related commissions and a host of other potentially landscape-altering proposals called for by a City Council thirsty for change.