Talen provides a visually rich history, showing how certain eras used rules to produce beautiful, walkable, and sustainable communities, while others created just the opposite. She makes complex regulations understandable, demystifying city rules like zoning and illustrating how written codes translate into real-world consequences. Most importantly, Talen proposes changes to these rules that will actually enhance communities' freedom to develop unique spaces.
Talen provides a visually rich history, showing how certain eras used rules to produce beautiful, walkable, and sustainable communities, while others created just the opposite. She makes complex regulations understandable, demystifying city rules like zoning and illustrating how written codes translate into real-world consequences. Most importantly, Talen proposes changes to these rules that will actually enhance communities' freedom to develop unique spaces.
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Overview
Talen provides a visually rich history, showing how certain eras used rules to produce beautiful, walkable, and sustainable communities, while others created just the opposite. She makes complex regulations understandable, demystifying city rules like zoning and illustrating how written codes translate into real-world consequences. Most importantly, Talen proposes changes to these rules that will actually enhance communities' freedom to develop unique spaces.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781610911764 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Island Press |
| Publication date: | 06/22/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 200 |
| File size: | 128 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
City Rules
How Regulations Affect Urban Form
By Emily Talen
ISLAND PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Emily TalenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61091-176-4
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
This is the story of how rules affect the physical character of cities. Using examples from around the United States, the book illustrates how rules, which collectively become codes, affect urban pattern and form in explicit and direct ways. These effects are not well understood. The effects are known in general terms, on such things as density and land value, but the effect on physical form and character of place is often obscured. Just what kind of environment is our layered legal framework concocting?
Given their impact, the neglect of rules—the failure to understand their effect—is surprising. In the United States, most urban land has, at one time or another, either been prescribed by a legally enforceable rule or built in defiance of one. Yet there are few sources that document this effect. This is problematic since, increasingly in our legalistic environment, codes are the basis for public decision making in all matters pertaining to the built environment.
This book documents the rise and fall of rules—from hopeful means of urban redemption to legalistic burden. Most importantly, it dissects the best and worst urban places and seeks to determine whether they are the result of explicit rules. This requires making a judgment about what "best" and "worst" mean. Generally, my evaluation is based on the degree to which rules sustain good urbanism. I define "good urbanism" as compact urban form that encourages pedestrian activity and minimizes environmental degradation; encourages social, economic, and land use diversity as opposed to homogeneity; connects uses and functions; has a quality public realm that provides opportunities for interaction and exchange; offers equitable access to goods, services, and facilities; and protects environmental and human health. Bad urbanism is the opposite: disconnected, automobile dependent, land consumptive, environmentally degrading, single-use, homogeneous, inequitable, and inaccessible, and with a low-quality, poorly designed public realm (see Talen 2011).
The connection between rules and good or bad urbanism is a matter of understanding both the effect and the neglect of rules. For example, the rules of Chandler, Arizona, created the landscape shown in figure 1.1—its municipal code states that there must be one parking space for every 250 square feet of commercial floor area. But there is also an absence of rules that might have been used to mitigate the negative effects (see box 1.1). Nothing in the rules prohibits parking from being the defining feature of the landscape.
Analyzing the effect of rules is a form of social history, and much is revealed: what do rules say about how American society values place, as well as neighborhood functionality, community organization, and social integration? Unraveling this is complicated by the fact that both the effect of rules as well as the motivations behind them, over the course of the twentieth century, became obscured. Rules are a reflection of values, but now, given the disconnect between rule and effect, it is hard to imagine that what people really want is sprawl, bad urban form, and monotony. This is certainly not what early city planners thought they were creating. As new code-reform efforts move forward, there needs to be a clear understanding and explanation of the underlying purposes and end goals. Any loss of connection between rule and purpose risks compromising the effect of the rule and obscuring more objectionable motivations.
Any hope of changing the rules that have disfigured the American landscape—sprawling and often disorienting, while at the same time, almost paradoxically, hy-persegregated—requires a keen understanding of the source, historical evolution, and effect of these rules. Through their manipulation of pattern, use, and form, rules have a strong impact on quality of life, affecting everything from patterns of daily life to the demographic makeup of schools to who lives next to whom. Are good urban places the result of a conscious coding effort? What specific rules can we thank for the great places we have, or blame for the other, dispiriting ones? When we experience a great city, neighborhood, street, or place, how much of it can be attributed to rules? Understanding this connection can help us to avoid the types of rules that result in bad places, and embrace and build on those that create good ones.
Because I focus on the American experience, zoning dominates this story—it is the mother lode of city rules. Other kinds of rules, such as utility regulations, deed restrictions, neighborhood review panels, impact fees, and federal laws, can affect urban form, sometimes dramatically, but zoning has had the broadest effect. Planners, real estate developers, environmentalists, and citizens have a largely negative view of zoning, and in the decades since its adoption in the early twentieth century, zoning has taken on a significant amount of baggage. But there is nothing intrinsic about zoning that should elicit such a negative response: zoning is simply a set of rules tied to a specific location. Curiously, rules by any other name, such as deed restrictions, often escape a more negative judgment. Deed restrictions did significantly impact the public realm, but in many areas, their control of built form was subsumed by zoning and subdivision regulation in the early twentieth century (with the notable exception of Houston, which never embraced zoning but which continues to control urban form via restrictive deeds and covenants). Zoning has a colorful history, full of antics used in the unrelenting effort to avoid it (Flint 1977; Burgess 1994). Creative circumvention included, for example, the invention of new building types (e.g., the "apartment hotel") as a way of skirting zoning rules (Plunz 1993). In the 1950s zoning represented the view of the world at the time, as inequality, exclusion, and automobile dependence were rendered in built form. Zoning is what is behind the paving of paradise (Stone 2004), the inflation of housing costs (Glaeser and Gyourko 2002), and the constant drain on the implementation of smarter growth (Talen and Knaap 2003). Largely, this has to do with the gradual expansion of zoning's requirements. Figure 1.2 shows how zoning between 1948 and 2005 enforced the gradual expansion of lot size requirements in one American city. The change might seem modest for a single lot, but the cumulative effect of this rule change has been dramatic—spreading the city out, increasing car dependence and land consumption, and reducing both the possibility of walkable access and the viability of public transit. Many communities are now trying to reverse these expansion trends, making it, once again, legal to build compact urban form.
Despite the mythology of rugged individualism, rules have always been an integral part of the American experience, and in the early twentieth century, it seemed natural to have all kinds of rules guiding our behavior (box 1.2). Rules are essential to city building—even Adam Smith knew that. The question is whatkinds of cities do rules create? The answer is something of a mystery. Though rules often function as the default urban policy position—perceived as a way of getting something for nothing, without having to spend public dollars—it is a policy position we promote recklessly. Rules guide what gets built where, often without a clear objective. The character of place that results, de facto, is usually not preconceived, let alone desired. With no one and nothing in charge of maintaining an overall idea about what cities should be like, rules become the default overseers of urban form.
While there are many other forces to blame for the disfigured American urban landscape, city rules are not helping. Over the course of the last century, American urban development has been characterized by inner-city disinvestment, sprawl, segregation, and a general lack of quality when it comes to urbanism. Rules not only contribute to this, they actively block better ambitions. The places we love and flock to—such as Nantucket or Annapolis—can be difficult to create without a team of lawyers to change or circumvent the rules.
Without a clear connection between rule and objective—or better yet, between rule and physical outcome—city planners are left holding the bag on rules they probably care little about, trying to defend them in the face of a public that is at best apathetic about regulations. Planners can only dream of a world in which a clear connection between helping to create good cities is linked to the rules they are required to enforce. And rules, once put into law, are not easily gotten rid of. Plans and politicians can be ignored or voted out, but rules and laws last. Case in point: two years after New York became the first U.S. city to adopt a comprehensive zoning ordinance in 1916, the planning committee and its staff were fired. The basic outlines of the code endured.
Rules affect urban pattern and form in a myriad of large and small ways. A seemingly simple rule, such as the requirement that apartments must have a second means of egress, can affect building size and configuration, and, ultimately, how cities are experienced. A bay window may require approval from a public commission, with the result being that bay windows become a rarity. Maybe a certain density level triggers design review, resulting in lower densities. Rules about minimum distance between stairs may determine how many units front a street. Laws might be used to stimulate the consumption of certain materials, such as brick and steel, which in turn impacts the character of urban form. The number of parking spaces required for each housing unit can have a profound effect on building configuration. Chicago's antibetting law of 1905 had the effect of converting race tracks to housing (Hoyt 1933). Consider the federal tax code and its effect on urban form via rules about loan guarantee. Federally backed mortgages of single-family, detached housing have been one of the biggest generators of suburbia.
Many planners in the United States are now trying to turn the rules of city building around. The effort is monumental, and results have been gradual and mixed. Most urban advocates are convinced that different kinds of rules—more adaptive, more form-based-are needed to produce better places. By recounting the history of codes and putting the current popularity of code reform in a broad historical context, I hope to reveal what is new and what is unchanged about the attempt to implement vision and design through the application of rules.
There have been some important recent works on the history, meaning, and implications of urban codes. Regulating Place(2004), edited by Eran Ben- Joseph and Terry Szold, and The Culture of Building (1999) by Howard Davis do an excellent job of positioning building regulations and zoning in a broader context. One of the few attempts to link codes to the creation of actual places is The Politics of Place: A History of Zoning in Chicago(2006), by Joseph P. Schwieterman and Dana M. Caspall. Urban designers have long been interested in the "invisible hand" of planning law and its effect on place (Lai 1988; Punter 1999), exploring how policies shape cities in books like Laws of the Landscape (Nivola 1999). U.S. scholars have become particularly interested in understanding how planning regulations have become so universally despised. One reason is the way in which evolving public goals have been grafted onto old regulatory methods, creating strange hybrids when in fact new ways of thinking are needed. Eran Ben-Joseph (2005) makes this point in his book The Code of the City.
New Urbanists, a group of urban reformers who advocate walkable, diverse, compact urbanism of the kind that existed before cars took control of American cities, have been particularly vocal about the effect of rules on the built environment, drawing the attention of designers back to codes and how they affect urban pattern and form. Two publications have documented New Urbanist codes: Steve Tracy's Smart Growth Zoning Codes: A Resource Guide (2004), and the Congress for the New Urbanism'sCodifying New Urbanism: How to Reform Municipal Land Development Regulations (2004). The state of form-based codes was reviewed in the book Form-Based Codes (Parolek, Parolek, and Crawford 2008).
City Rules differs from the foregoing texts by its focus on illuminating cause and effect—the impact of codes on place. This is unique in that it is not about general principles but about making clear that the world we have built and continue to build is strongly influenced by specific rules. This differs, for example, from the recent book A Better Way to Zone: Ten Principles to Create More Livable Cities (Elliott 2008), which explores how codes can be made more responsive, fair, efficient, and flexible, and can adhere to other generalized principles. This book's aim is to be more literal: what is the translation between rule and effect on the ground?
This connection is better understood by studying the motives and underlying intent of early rule makers—the city planners who convinced everyone in the first two decades of the twentieth century that rules were essential for good city building. What reasons were used to promote these rules, and how and why did they evolve the way they did? Surveying this history, it often seems as though the original intent of a rule made sense, and that the history of rules in the United States is the history of losing the connection between intention and outcome. As one example—junk shops, which could be noxious and unattractive, were considered a menace to tenement houses (i.e., apartment buildings) in the early twentieth century, so it made sense to create a rule to limit them. Later, this rule was extended to all kinds of shops, not just noxious ones, which undermined the notion of mixed use—now regarded as essential to good urbanism. In the end, the connection between rule and underlying reason seemed to have been lost. A few other examples of the ironies and contradictions of rules, to be further explored in this book, are listed in table 1.1.
Rules are a powerful way to enact change. Early city planners understood this acutely. They watched their ideas spread like a virus, as zoning, in particular, was being adopted by virtually every American city in the 1920s. Early city planners wanted a certain kind of city—ordered, efficient, beautiful, and socially just—and they wrote the rules that they thought would create it. There is a clear lesson to be drawn from this experience. If planners want to change these rules now to adapt to current conditions, they need to understand the effects that regulations have and could have on the pattern and form of cities. This book is intended to contribute to the understanding of the power of regulation and how it can make a real and substantial difference. In this it rekindles an old objective: that the writing of rules can help to achieve noble aspirations when it comes to city building.
Themes
Two broad and interrelated themes dominate this exploration:
• Over the course of the last century, a loss of understanding of the overall effect of rules, as well as what motivated their creation, has led to a substantial disconnect between rule and urban reality, which has undermined good urbanism.
• To recover this connection, we need to have a more explicit understanding of the effect of rules.
While there is great interest in the topic of place (Dovey 2009; Cresswell 2004; Lippard 1998), how place is specifically impacted by rules is not well studied. Related to this, planners—and in fact, American society generally—seem to have lost sight of their principal ambitions when it comes to city rules. Rules used to meansomething. Rules we now live with were formulated under an entirely different set of urban conditions—the conditions changed, but the rules did not. City rules went from being mostly revered to mostly despised. For urban reformers who want to tackle the problem of rules today, it is important to understand what changed and what needs to change.
The planners who first formulated the rules of city building in the early twentieth century—especially zoning and subdivision regulations—grappled with the connection between regulation and form. They often debated how rules would affect place and character. "The quality of life," proclaimed a 1931 report issued by the federal government, "is as dependent upon the way a subdivision is laid out ... as upon any other factor" (Gries and Ford 1931, 12).
While there is no dispute that there is a lot more to good urbanism than rules, early regulations more effectively considered the link between rules and place. For example, the nation's first comprehensive zoning ordinance, adopted in 1916 in New York City, was trying to solve four very specific physical conditions that were compromising human health and quality of life: factories bringing pollution into retail and residential areas, skyscrapers blocking light, overly congested streets and sidewalks, and overcrowding in residential areas (Adams 1922). Planners were intently interested in physical planning and design, more than in bureaucratic application. Even Edward M. Bassett, lawyer and "Father of American Zoning," was mostly interested in "the physical development of the city," and he "felt more at home with architects and engineers than with his fellow-lawyers" (Makielski 1966, 10). Zoning seemed perfectly capable of attending to this interest in desired physical outcomes and effect on urban quality.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from City Rules by Emily Talen. Copyright © 2012 Emily Talen. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
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