Kingston’s common council voted 8-1 on Tuesday, April 6 to pay a Florida-based consultant $500,000 to update its zoning code. The city’s zoning has not been updated in more than 50 years. The new code would follow a “form-based” approach, which emphasizes factors like aesthetics, walkability, and how the built environment can reflect a community’s overall vision. This relatively new philosophy of zoning is contrasted with traditional zoning, which is mostly based on segregating different parts of the city by permissible use and defining requirements (like building height or setback from the road) in numerical terms.