Recode Knoxville started in 2017 as an effort to carefully evaluate and modernize the existing zoning codes, which had dictated the built form of the city without any major overhaul for nearly half a century. Through a collaboration of design and planning professionals and many public input meetings, drafts of the zoning map and code book were created and revised. As of January 2019, the fourth draft of the code book and the third draft of the map had been released for public input, and to test out the practicality and comprehension of the updates, an afternoon-long charrette was scheduled for February.

On Friday, February 1, 2019, at the City Public Works Building, local architects, planners, developers, and students from Professor Marleen Davis’s third-year Design Studio at the University of Tennessee’s College of Architecture + Design gathered together and formed six teams to study how the new codes affected six distinct sites throughout the city. The results from each team were presented at the end of the charrette and a public reception was held afterward that allowed one-on-one interactions with the designers to review the successes and failures of the new codes. The Team findings from the charrette can be found in the booklet on our Issuu page.