OCTOBER 2006 » book review

Place-making standards

The Code of the City: Standards and the Hidden Language of Place Making
by Eran Ben-Joseph
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA; 2005
241 pp.; paperback; 66 b&w illus.; $24; (cloth cover is $60)
ISBN 0-262-52445-7 (paperback)
ISBN 0-262-02588-4 (cloth cover)

Reviewed by Rob Robinson

Urban designers and architects interested in good urbanism have a full-time job creating new standards for zoning and land-development standards in order to build decent places to live, work and play. Additionally, as we become more in touch with our environmental side, the complexity of integrating the methods, techniques and considerations into the design and approval process intensifies. The required "coding" and development of alternative standards and measures is now part of the design brief for most projects of any scale.

Those involved in the practice of designing and building places that respond to local context and sense of place will find many common points of view with Eran Ben-Joseph in his book The Code of the City. He provides a broad context for the ongoing struggle to introduce new ways of thinking about standards and codes in an increasingly difficult political and regulatory process. As we explore relatively new territory in the development of alternative urban standards and principles, it is helpful to recognize the underlying premise and intent of existing standards and practices we often seek to change. Ben-Joseph's research underscores the fundamentals at play in the development and evolution of codes and standards that regulate development patterns in our cities, towns and rural settlements. Many have their beginnings based on concerns and criteria that are still important but create fixed standards based on outdated concepts and technology.

Regulations, like taxes, are slow to change and seem to grow exponentially over time. Urban designers are regularly faced with design criteria that can no longer produce the most admired and most livable places because of "new" standards that accommodate specific elements without balancing broader concerns such as the importance of designing environmentally sensitive and context-appropriate plans.

The master-planned community movement was at the threshold of changing the rules before the arrival of the current crop of New Urbanists, albeit in a different and perhaps more isolated viewpoint. A common thread was the design and development of places that responded to the marketplace and the sense of unique place making. Ben-Joseph discusses this evolution and focuses on the alternative forces that influence the public policy side of development regulation. It is interesting that the private-sector development community tends to lead the major shifts in public policy, though it is really no surprise in this country where federal regulation is often too clumsy to respond to local context. State-initiated efforts never seem to have enough juice to create meaningful change in development policy in ways that lead to innovation and place making. At the local level, policy makers have a hard time keeping up with the changing and evolving options because of available time, resources and talent. It is a tough arena for innovation and thoughtful practice.

The Code of the City is most entertaining and interesting in the initial chapters, where Ben-Joseph provides a broad-brush survey of examples of various sources of regulation and urban-design criteria in different cultures and at different time periods. The shared traits of early codes or standards revolved around social and cultural norms that produced a common-sense consensus on the right thing to do to make places work better, respect the public realm and minimize the negative effect on neighboring properties. It makes for interesting reading and provides a good trivia resource. Form and function appear as connected concepts as the reader learns about grids, water supply systems, storm water and sewage treatment. Those surveyors had a corner on the market for a long time as well, particularly with the common standard of measurement and the early certification effort to establish surveying as a professional practice with standards of performance and knowledge.

The dominance of niche professional interests and standards is documented in the book as central to the incremental growth of development and design standards for communities. In recent decades, fire safety, sanitation, overcrowding and health concerns have combined with the zeal for new infrastructure standards to create the equivalent of SUVs in the design of towns and cities.

The result of many of these standards has been disappointing to much of the public and the professional design and development community. Places are less environmentally responsive, yet they are held to standards that are supposed to protect the environment. They seem less safe, even though streets can accommodate fire trucks, high-speed vehicles and parades at the same time, and buildings are spaced far enough apart to limit contact with neighbors in order to protect privacy and maintain value. The reasons for the wide variety of regulations are fascinating and good information for practitioners running into the wall as rules and regulations foil attempts to change the patterns.

I draw slightly different conclusions when I read this book. Public policy, in practically every arena, is a response to a perceived need and common standard to serve the public interest in a basic way. It is rarely groundbreaking or flexible. The flexibility index typically moves from federal (least flexible) to local. While development and land-use codes are slow to change, it is fascinating that so much innovation and change is taking place. Local jurisdictions are responding to best practices and rational criteria to change the rules and experiment with evolving methods and techniques.

Architects and planners are not exactly the best resources for sound and wise development policy either. We've had a mediocre report card on modern and technologically sound buildings and community design over the last 50 or so years. Many architects could not articulate good urban principles 10-15 years ago. New Urbanism is still a divisive series of principles for the Modernist architects and planners who prefer something less definitive. I would support the notion that public policy moves along at the pace of the practitioner's knowledge and level of competence.

Ben-Joseph implies that there are many environmentally appropriate and efficient community-development methods that do not fit the nicely calculated engineering models that govern storm water and other elements of community design. While there are some promising examples and practitioners introduce new ideas every day, the science is young, largely untested, and difficult to project how performance, management and long-term maintenance impact local municipalities and cities. It is a growing and evolving process of change.

The notion of creating more flexible and responsive standards that allow for locally and regionally appropriate design responsiveness is well represented in most communities through variations on planned-unit development applications that proposed new standards, densities, mixes of uses, etc. These are negotiated and worked out in open, public arenas.

Ben-Joseph calls for better three-dimensional representation so that communities understand the proposals and results of imposed or proposed physical development criteria. This is perhaps the most important point in the book. It is really the responsibility of both the design and development team as well as the public-policy body to provide the three-dimensional representation of new development.

The connection between architecture, urban patterns and existing context has been missing for much of the approval process and discussion of what works and what does not seem to work so well. Just sit through a few planning commission meetings in your town and see the level of drawings, presentations made in order to get approval for a typical project. Nobody in the room has a clue what the end result will be. TB

Rob Robinson, AIA, is managing principal of Urban Design Associates of Pittsburgh, PA. He pioneered the development of UDA Pattern Books and has developed numerous master plans and urban design plans. Robinson is active in the Congress for New Urbanism and recently co-authored The Architectural Pattern Book. Published by Norton Publishing, it is the second in a series of three publications on urban design.

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