A Western Washington University professor of urban planning has received one of the field's top regional honors for her work on a statewide digital mapping tool that makes Washington's complex zoning codes accessible to planners, researchers, and the public. Tammi Laninga, who teaches urban planning and sustainable development at WWU, co-authored an article about the Washington State Zoning Atlas that has been named The Western Planner's Stan Steadman Article of the Year for 2026.
The article, titled "The Complete (Zoning) Picture: Collaboration is Key to Washington's new online Zoning Atlas," was published in The Western Planner, a professional journal serving planners, tribes, government agencies, and nonprofits across 13 western states including Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii. The award, named for the journal's founder, recognizes the piece that best offers practical solutions and fosters collaboration between planners and their communities. It is among the most meaningful recognitions a practitioner-facing planning publication in the western United States can confer.
What the Washington State Zoning Atlas Does
The Washington State Zoning Atlas is an interactive online tool and downloadable database that standardizes and simplifies local zoning and land-use codes from across Washington state. Anyone who has tried to navigate zoning codes knows how dense and inconsistent they can be from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. A development regulation that uses one term in Bellingham might use a completely different term for the same concept in Spokane or Tacoma. The same underlying land use category might appear under dozens of distinct labels depending on which city or county wrote the ordinance and when. The atlas cuts through that fragmentation by mapping all of those local classifications into a standardized system that allows meaningful side-by-side comparisons between cities and counties across the state.
The result is a tool that lets a researcher ask, for example, which jurisdictions allow accessory dwelling units by right, or which cities permit multifamily housing within a half-mile of transit stations. Without standardization, answering those questions requires reading hundreds of individual municipal codes. With the atlas, the answers are accessible through a map interface that anyone can navigate without specialized training in land use law.
The project was funded by the Washington Department of Commerce and built over 18 months by a coalition that included WWU urban planning faculty and students, Seattle consulting firms MAKERS architecture and urban design and BHC Consultants, the University of Washington's Natural Resource Spatial Informatics Group, and urban planning faculty and students from Eastern Washington University and the University of Washington campuses in Seattle and Tacoma. The partnership across four universities, two consulting firms, and a state agency is itself the subject of the award-winning article, which explores not just what the atlas does but how an undertaking of that complexity was managed across so many different institutions and teams.
What Students Gained From the Project
One of the aspects Laninga highlighted most directly was what the project meant for the WWU students who worked on it. Zoning codes are notoriously idiosyncratic. Each jurisdiction builds its own regulatory system over decades, layering amendments, conditional use overlays, and special designations until the result is hundreds of unique classifications that resist easy comparison. Distilling all of that into a consistent and logical standardized schema was exactly the kind of challenge that forces students to engage with the real-world complexity of planning practice in ways that no classroom exercise can replicate.
"One of the most fascinating aspects of the project was students discovering quickly how complex zoning can be," Laninga said in remarks shared by WWU. "Distilling hundreds of unique codes into a standardized system was no small feat. That challenge became a learning experience that our students will take with them in their careers."
The students who worked on the atlas were not doing simplified academic exercises. They were building a real public resource that is now actively used by planners and policymakers across Washington state. That distinction matters for professional development in ways that are difficult to manufacture in a traditional course setting. Students had to make judgment calls about how to categorize ambiguous provisions, negotiate interpretation questions with collaborators at other universities and consulting firms, and produce work that met the quality standards of a state agency deliverable.
Western Washington University's urban planning program, housed in the College of the Environment, offers both bachelor's and master's degrees and has a history of partnering with public agencies on applied research. The zoning atlas project is a strong example of that model: real deliverable, real public benefit, and real professional experience for the students who did the work.
Why It Matters for Whatcom County and Beyond
The zoning atlas has direct relevance for housing policy discussions happening across Washington right now. As cities and counties navigate state mandates to increase housing density, streamline permitting, and encourage affordable development, having a clear and comparable view of zoning patterns across jurisdictions is genuinely useful for researchers, advocates, and policymakers. The tool makes it easier to ask questions like: which cities allow multifamily housing near transit corridors, and which do not? Where are jurisdictions falling short of density targets set by state housing legislation? Where are local zoning codes creating barriers that state law was intended to remove?
In Bellingham and Whatcom County, where housing affordability and development capacity have been persistent topics at the City Council and County Council levels, a resource like the atlas gives local planners a broader analytical frame for understanding how Bellingham's approach compares to peer cities and to statewide patterns. Advocates working on housing access issues can use it to identify where Bellingham is doing better or worse than comparable jurisdictions and to build evidence-based arguments for specific zoning reforms.
The award the article received is recognition that practitioners across the western United States see the same value in the work. The Stan Steadman Article of the Year award will be formally presented at the Western Planner conference in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in August. For readers interested in the housing and land-use policy dimensions of the project, related coverage of Bellingham's ongoing development discussions is available in recent local reporting on the city's housing initiatives.
