Here in the region there is a municipality that has very restrictive development plans created: facing brickwork, ban on shiny roofs, only gable and half-hipped roofs, defined color spaces for walls, bricks, and wood, maximum building and eave height, single-story, planting list, ban on rock gardens, etc. The result is harmonious new development areas that have a uniform village character but still obviously leave room for individual design. I like it and it is therefore my guideline for development plans.
If there really are such examples where, in my view, unnecessarily "tight" regulatory corsets have not backfired and/or have even produced exemplary results, then these should be collected and analyzed as best practices (which is also done: council members’ working groups or even committees do day trips to partner municipalities or model communities).
I actually like "regulated" areas that prevent the clustering of city villas and boxes – the example I mentioned achieves exactly that. New modern residential houses stand or are being built there, but their form fits into a Lower Saxony village. Where there are fewer regulations here, exactly what you reject is being built.
This seems to me to be the central misunderstanding of many development plan cooks: that there is a positive (= at least not inversely proportional) causal relationship between the density of regulations and curbing excesses. Unfortunately, the much more often true and much underestimated (even though we still know too little about its mechanics) is the obviously also causal relationship between "well-intentioned" and "badly done." That is why I recommended evaluating recent previous development plans under the aspect of "what should have been prevented but still happened" or "which evil did we actually want to prevent, and which harmless freedoms were hit instead by troublemakers."
If at one location there were a "wild" and a "regulated" area, I would always prefer the "wild," and you would probably prefer the "regulated."
That unfortunately doesn’t help much, because it often exists and does not have the desired effect: those wanting to build would have a desired freedom in Area A but only get a plot in Area B and then try to bend the rules there until they have built an almost A-type house in B.
I wouldn’t prescribe so much at all. Rather a framework plan with a points system. So that the 300 sqm lawn can be balanced with a bird-butterfly hedge as an enclosure suitable for robots. The missing cistern with less sealed surface.
So something like what I touched on with the proposal of the Balanced Scorecard.