This post is an introduction to a new series we’re running on Illinois Wildside called “Resources for City Planners”. As you can tell from the title, the posts under this series will be aimed at a very particular audience; city planners and other city officials who oversee the ordinances that give structure to everyday life in municipalities across Illinois.
The reason we’re writing these blogs is that we’ve seen a huge uptick in the number of conflicts resulting from residents installing native gardens. After responding to many inquiries about these conflicts and speaking with both residents and city officials, we want to provide some guidance that city planners will find useful.
We’re not the first to note the native gardening/city ordinance conflict. Several organizations have before us, and in response have created “model ordinances” that they hope city planners will adopt. These model ordinances are amazing; if implemented, residents could install native plants in their gardens with confidence, and cities would have a broad permission structure to create pollinator-friendly spaces across the city.
We also think those model codes can be very difficult to implement for some municipalities, either because of political forces, limited resources for a legal review of overhauled code, or because the inclusion of the model code would require drastic changes to the definitions that are baked into the rest of the code.
While we will provide some model code later on in this series (as well as some examples of accommodations we think cities can make with little or no change to their code) we think it might also be useful to equip city planners with the biological and ecological knowledge they need to craft or modify code of their own. This knowledge will be beneficial not only for embedding the principles of good land stewardship into city code, but also when presenting the amended code to boards and commissions that may be unfamiliar with these issues.
The first blog in the series will outline the basics of the conflicts caused by native gardens.