The Sarasota Downtown Master Plan 2020, prepared by internationally renowned urban planner Andrés Duany of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, was adopted exactly 25 years ago, in January 2001. It promised a city remade through walkable streets, mixed-use blocks and a code that prized human scale over parking ratios—a comprehensive manifesto for how Sarasota could grow up without growing apart.
At the time, Sarasotans were elated. Duany—the sharp-tongued co-founder of the New Urbanist movement—had arrived with a vision for transforming a low-slung Gulf Coast city into something more cosmopolitan, coherent and urbane. Local officials called his hiring a coup. Civic boosters envisioned café tables on shaded sidewalks, ground-floor shops buzzing after dark, and a downtown area stitched back to the bay and adjacent neighborhoods.
Twenty-five years later, the City of Sarasota is once again poring over that same playbook. The city’s planning department has begun the process of updating Duany’s 2001 master plan, an acknowledgment that the city has, in many ways, outgrown its early-millennium draft—and in others fallen short of it. The review raises the question: After all this time, has Sarasota realized the New Urbanist ideal, or paved over it?…