BETHEL — Create a vision for a town, design it, then code it.

It’s that simple, Alan Manoian, Bridgton’s economic and community development director, told about 40 town managers who came to the Bethel Inn on Friday to hear about form-based codes.

Manoian was the first certified form-based code administrator in Maine and New Hampshire when he came to work for Bridgton in 2008.

He addressed town managers from across Maine, including Farmington, Poland and Livermore Falls, and New Hampshire.

Manoian was the technical consultant to the town of Standish, the first town in Maine to adopt form-based coding.

“Their vision was laid out, but their zoning wouldn’t allow them to do it,” he said. Standish adopted the codes for its center earlier this year, after a developer proposed building a gas station and fuel delivery depot in the center of town.

Form-based codes is described as “addressing the relationship between building facades and the public realm, the form and mass of building in relation to one another and the scale and types of streets and blocks.”

It is typically used in large sprawling areas such as Florida and California as an alternative to municipal zoning and emphasizes form and scale, the character of development, rather than just land use types. It emphasizes mixed-used development and encourages residential growth in the village setting.

Simply put, it’s not how a street looks, it’s how a street lives, said Manoian.

“Simplify, simplify, simplify,” said Manoian of the form-based codes, quoting Henry David Thoreau. Break it down, he said. It should take no more than 30 pages to describe form-based codes.

Form-based codes talk about the form first. “You’re not throwing out use,” Manoian told town managers.

For example, he said, traditional zoning regulations often require a structure to be “harmonious” with existing uses or of “New England character.”

“What are you talking about? With form-based code it’s clear, it’s laid out,” he said.

In conventional zoning, everything must be isolated, segregated and spread out, Manoian said. He referred to a development pattern that began in the 1960s when big parking lots and signs on the streets and pod development began. “Everything is negotiable. That’s why the zoning attorneys are rich and making tons of money,” Maonian said.

In traditional form-based codes there are no set-back requirements. There are build-to requirements, he said. The need is to bring the buildings up close to the street and put the parking lots on the side or behind the buildings.

In Bridgton, where zoning was implemented in 1971 but thrown out by voters in 1976, Manoian said the fabric of the downtown village is torn apart by curb cuts.

“No one really walks the street,” he said, showing a picture of a section of Portland Road in Bridgton with its classic pods of development. Manoian said the road became the parking lot. The parking lot became the road. It happened everywhere in the last half of the 20th century because the emphasis became the parking lots and the big signs. Placement of the structure became secondary.

You want to see parking in the sides or back of buildings not in the front because you want a walkable downtown, he said. Windows need to be facing the street so potential customers can look in and see what’s happening. The gable end of a building should face the street, not the long extended side of the building, he said.

Camden, Bath, North Hampton and Concord, Mass., are the downtown villages that people flock to, Manoian said.

“I don’t care where I park. I’m going to a place. I’m going to spend a ton of money there,” he said, referring to the downtown of Newburyport, Mass., another example of the effectiveness of form-based codes.

Connecting the parking to Main Street is critical, he said

“Prescriptive is the operative word here. We’re going to code that place,” he said.

Poland Town Manager Rosemary Kulow called the idea exciting and said she hopes to bring it to the Board of Selectmen and planners in the near future.

“I was very excited about what I heard,” Kulow said Monday. Although Poland, like many of the towns, has lost much of its centralized village, Kulow said the concept could be used in future planning in developing and utilizing space better.

Manoian is working with other communities such as Naples to develop form-based coding in their communities.

“I feel like the Johnny Appleseed of form-based codes,” Manoian said Monday. “Here’s the seed, plant it and let’s see what might grow.”

[email protected]

BETHEL — Henry David Thoreau, Charles Dickens, these were the 19th-century people who understood the true character of a village, said Alan Manoian, Bridgton’s economic and community development director and a certified form-based codes administrator.

He told town managers from across Maine and New Hampshire who gathered in Bethel on Friday for a workshop on form-based codes that in 1845 Henry David Thoreau spoke about form-based codes in his book “Walden.”

Thoreau wrote: “I observed that the vitals of the village were the grocery, the barroom, the post-office, and the bank; . . . and the houses were so arranged as to to make the most of mankind, in lanes and fronting one another, so that every traveler has to run the gauntlet and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him.”

“This is pure form-based coding, Manoian told the managers as he read the excerpt from the chapter called “The Village.”

“You want people to come to your village, to be a part of your village and to walk your village,” he said.

In 1842, Charles Dickens journeyed to the Midwest after living in New England, Manoian said. “I would have given the world for a crooked street,” Dickens wrote.

“He’s talking about Bridgton,” Manoian said. “We love cranky streets.”

“This is not just about the look. It’s how a street lives. How a street functions,” Manoian said.