| | Introduction to Form-Based Codes |
Transcript of Peter Katz and Geoffrey Ferrell‘s presentation to Council IV, (independently published), Santa Fe, NM
Transcription by Jason Miller
October 18, 2002
[View the pdf]
“…we’re shaping the public realm with private buildings…we’re talking about the simple background buildings that create the walls of the street. It’s a very basic concept, but it is this interaction of public and private…” – Peter Katz, on the outcomes of form-based coding
[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT]
Bill Dennis:
We’re going to move next to Peter Katz and Geoff Ferrell. We’re not going to take an official break, but if you need to move up, that’s fine; don’t worry about that.
I guess I should introduce you; nobody knows you! Peter Katz, who is partially responsible for that terrible name we all have to deal with—new urbanism—
Peter Katz:
I didn’t—
Dennis:
I know, I know, there were a lot of partners in crime on that one—has really codified in a lot of ways particularly the images of new urbanism, and a lot of the frameworks of new urbanism. And he and Geoff Ferrell have been working on some interesting approaches to form-based codes.
Katz:
Thank you. You know, I ran CNU for several years, but that didn’t mean that they’d ever let me get up and talk about this stuff. It’s kind of one of those weird things about running an organization.
Question: How many of you know what form-based codes are? Raise your hands. It’s hard for me to tell who . . . it’s a good bunch. All right. Now, how many of you use form-based codes in your work? Okay. A fair number. And, how many of you own copies of this book (holds up The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community). Heh, heh, heh. Okay.
All right, well, I want to begin this explanation with my own experience with the codes, which is really quite fascinating. My experience, of course, began with this book. But, interestingly, I didn’t really know what the codes were until several years after my book was published. I didn’t really understand them. Basically, what happened—this of course is the group of contributors who tortured me throughout the process of putting the book together. Actually, it was mutual: I had the great pleasure of actually working in their offices, sitting down and really getting my education in new urbanism and the codes, from the practitioners. It was a great experience. There were many nonbillable hours that those offices generated on account of me.
One of the things that came up during the writing of the book—what drove me was my interest in design. I loved to look at plans and renderings, and have these folks explain to me all the little nuances of the plans, but there were a certain number of them—I won’t mention names—who could talk only about codes. Codes this, codes that—every time I heard the word “codes,” my eyes would glaze over. And then a curious thing happened. You know, authors are always sparring with their publishers about things, and my publisher had a limit on the number of color pages they were going to give me. Forty percent of my book is black-and-white pages. I thought, what am I going to do with all of these pages? Because we had all these great color images. So finally, it dawned on me that I could take these codes, blow them up, and fill pages with them.
And so that’s what I did: I asked Andres, “Which project has the most codes?”
He said, “We did a lot for Wellington.”
So I said, “Give me the codes.” So I packed them into the book. We reproduced them; we went in one step from the original drawing down to the negatives that actually got stripped into the book, so that the lettering, even though it’s quite small, you can take a magnifying glass and read it. But, there is very little explanation of the codes in the book; they’re just there. It wasn’t until years afterward that I really learned how they really worked. The curious thing about the codes is that they’re very, very simple, but it does take a couple of hearings before this stuff starts to sink in. That was the case for me, and I consider myself to be in the higher percentile of intelligence.
It just took a while. Part of the problem is, they’re so damn simple. But it is a different system.
Curiously, there is one individual in that photograph—Geoff Ferrell, you can spot him by the bowtie—about whom I was told, “If you really want to know about the codes, this guy—he’s a complete maniac about them.” Geoffrey—I call him the “quiet new urbanist”; he’s the one in the photograph who hasn’t been tooting his horn a lot—has really been a pioneer in this stuff. He worked in DPZ’s office. He and Sam Poole created the Dade County TND ordinance back in 1991; this was the first county-wide attempt to do a new urbanist ordinance for a whole county, and which, even though it’s been problematic in its implementation, is still very significant and was responsible for a lot of the coding innovations in Duany’s office.
Again, I’m going to quote Andres. We were talking about these codes years ago, and he said, “You really have to be a special kind of person to do these things.” And I remember something about the words “anal retentive,” and he said: “Somebody like Geoffrey.”
Anyway, you can see I’m trying to flatter my co-presenter . . .
Anyway, as it happens, I’ve been living for the past three years in Washington, D.C., as has Geoff, and we got a grant from the (Richard H.) Driehaus Foundation of Chicago to produce much of the presentation you’re going to see. My fascination with codes is simply the desire to explain them. I don’t do the codes; Geoffrey does. Those people with circles around their heads do, and I’m sure several more, at this point. Not a lot of firms do codes; one of my concerns is to broaden that circle. But most of what I’ve learned here and what you’ll see in the presentation is really what I’ve learned from these folks, and I am playing it back to you. I’m using a bit of my graphic design knowledge to make some of these things a little more understandable.
Let’s start with where we are today. All over America, communities have decided that things like smart growth and new urbanism are good. Compact development—they want to preserve their older buildings, and a lot of them are embarking on very ambitious code rewrites, to basically make it easier to do those kinds of development. Chicago is the largest place doing it; this presentation was created to try to influence the process in Chicago, because we’re worried that for all the effort they’re going through, they’re just going to end up with the same problems they began with. And, because there is so little benefit in just revamping the current zoning system, it may not even work at all.
The discussion we were just having is very germane to where our starting point is. Because we’re trying to understand this all in a big picture. Again, our presentation is a kind of reiteration of a lot of the same things Paul (Crawford) has just gone through; we just have better pictures, in some cases. Some of his pictures were fantastic, though.
If you think of two basic spheres of activity: On the left, in the blue, are these policy documents; whether you call them general plans, specific plans, framework plans—the language is different in every part of the country; it’s totally confusing. APA’s Growing Smart Initiative is attempts to reconcile some of the language problems. But that’s generally part of this process we call zoning today. The other part of it is specifically regulations, whether you call them subdivision ordinances, specific plans; Form-based codes are what we believe is a better solution to that need. But it’s generally these two spheres and together, they include that thing called zoning.
What we’re learning—a lot of communities around the country say, “We’re rewriting our zoning.” Well, all they’re really doing is rewriting the policy statements. They’re saying, “We want pedestrian-oriented design, we want compact development.” They want all these things, but they aren’t necessarily producing the development regulations to actually create that outcome. They’re just doing one part of it. We believe that those policies without the regulations isn’t going to make much change.
Here’s a good case in point: Here you see a picture of all those good things communities want. Compact development, transit, housing—all those good things. But read the statement up above: “Infill and develop in existing urbanized areas, build affordable multi-family housing near transportation corridors.” That’s all the kind of language you’re seeing in those policy documents.
The problem is, those documents are also fulfilled by this. Same thing. They all meet the same criteria. If we could back up . . . this is what we really want. The problem is, that the policy regulations alone are not achieving that. We need something more. That’s where the form-based coding comes in.
But, if you do the development regulations on their own, without the policy foundation, that often is illegal. We could go around for hours, talking about “Is the general plan the same as the sector plan?” That’s not the important point; the important point is that there are these two parts that need to be addressed.
But the problem is, even when you address the two parts together, there are still problems. Specifically, one of the problems is that they kind of bleed, one into the other. Often, the policy statements do have some elements of a physical plan in them. Often, the physical plans do have some elements of intentions: “We want these things to happen, but we’re not saying quite how we’re going to make them happen.”
So it’s a very mushy world out there. And this supposed precise legal framework that the attorneys keep telling us we have, really is pretty darn mushy.
Another problem is that—and this is enshrined in law—those policy documents, which are typically concerned with lofty things like developing and sustaining community, are asking for one thing, while the actual development regulations are asking for something else. They’re dealing with density, land-use, and all the kind of “impacts” that citizens become very concerned about: “That’s impacting my home; it doesn’t harmonize with my property.”
So you’ve got these things out of joint, these documents are often inconsistent. And what that does is force an increasing reliance on all those unresolved design issues, and cause an increasing reliance on discretionary design review. And when people talk about takings issues and property rights problems, that’s what’s creating them. It’s not having a framework in law; what’s creating them is when Bob the Architect and Ted the Landscape Architect—both of whom we know have great taste and are thoughtful individuals—sit down and start making up rules on the fly. It’s the capriciousness of the process, where people suddenly say, “We really want you to put this jogging trail in next to your dry-cleaning company, and then we’ll grant you the approval to expand your space.” Those are the things that are triggering the takings problems—not having a strong design framework.
Just to illustrate that point, here’s a typical zoning ordinance that is blown up so you can read it, talking about setbacks: minimum five feet, possibly ten feet in certain districts. On the other side, we’re talking about site width: 75 feet, 50 feet—these are what are often on the rule books. You look them up, you struggle through the prose, and that’s what you find. And indeed, what that means is that these lovely little storefronts that you admire when you go on vacation, aren’t possible in your community. Nor is this new corner store possible in your community. These violate those ordinances.
So what happens, to try to reconcile them, is that things get kicked into design review. And that’s where the troubles happen. In so much of what is being done nowadays, the whole legislative side, the drawing up of the ordinance side, is totally broken. So what happens is, more and more, we just accept a broken system and kick everything into design review, which is sort of the judicial side of the process. Everything gets arbitrated in design review, which is why people are there till 2:00 in the morning. And there’s somehow this blind faith that Ted and Jane, who are professionals, have good taste and will guide us.
But it’s not really an issue of good architecture; it’s about good rules. And you can see: That’s not a bad building up on top, but somebody had the idea of facing the blank side out to the busy boulevard. And that wasn’t a good decision. Down on the bottom, you see a nice piece of architecture, but a lot of it is because it’s sited properly and it’s doing the right things urbanistically.
So what are some principles for good rules? We’re going to present three that drive our thinking and, to my mind, these are the things we’ve observed most frequently:
1. Rules codify a physical plan.
2. Don’t try to code everything, just what’s important.
3. Private buildings shape the public realm.
Chicago is trying to write it’s zoning in the abstract. They’re saying, “We don’t want a plan—we’re not talking about planning our neighborhoods—we just want to rewrite our ‘zoning’”—and then we’ll redraw some maps. But God forbid, don’t anybody mention planning because we’ve been struggling with that for 50 years and we don’t want to go there.”
Well, I’ve maintained that’s not possible. Somewhere, you’re codifying a plan. Or, Peter Park mentioned this. In Milwaukee they attempted to do it. They said, “We didn’t have time to replan the whole city, so we just took what was there and codified it.” And that has the effect of basically freezing what’s there, which may be good or may be bad. But they try to make what’s there, legal.
[END OF TAPE]
[BEGIN TAPE 2]
—and clearly, you see areas, you see all the colors—the blue, the green, the brown, the yellow—but we haven’t really a clue as to what each of those areas look like, physically. And that’s one of the problems with the current system.
With this coding, we’re not attempting to define everything. People talk about “Oh, don’t be too prescriptive.” We’re not, hopefully. But in a townhouse, one of the really important things is the stoop, and lifting the building up. So, in a code, that’s something specified. You see in the yellow, the information needed. There’s not a lot of other information given about the townhouse, but it has to have a stoop. That’s information: fairly simple, fairly straightforward. That’s an important thing. We’re not worried about the curve of the arch over the door.
And then, finally, one of the very first things I learned about the new urbanism is that we’re shaping the public realm with private buildings. Those big outdoor rooms—I’m not talking about the big, fancy, public buildings: the building with the flag on it on the left, and the big building on the top—we’re talking about the simple background buildings that create the walls of the street. It’s a very basic concept, but it is this interaction of public and private.
The presentation that we did focuses on Chicago, and it was interesting that Burnham image is sort of my starting point, and it’s something we’re going to kind of stay with throughout.
Let me remind you: This is the cover of their zoning ordinance. They sell an advertisement on the cover of their zoning ordinance; that sets the overall mood of what’s happening in Chicago! This document was last seriously updated in 1957. And what they’ve done is they’ve discovered the deficiencies of the document, and they keep layering on different other documents to deal with special districts, special conditions—a lot of planners and attorneys have made a lot of money working with [Chicago] and in fact, it’s all pretty confusing.
And so, here we are in 2002: They’ve decided it’s time to clean house, wipe the slate clean, create a new zoning ordinance. And we’re kind of gadflies on the side of that process. What’s interesting to me is that at every stage of Chicago’s build-out, the city has been very, very physical, and no more dramatically so than the Burnham plan, but the curious thing is that the current zoning is very much policy-driven. And the Chicago we have nowadays, most of the good stuff we like tends to relate back to that earlier period. The recent Chicago is really a function of zoning and not a very good place.
Geoffrey and I are going to be tag-teaming this, and—
Geoffrey Ferrell:
—You won’t even notice the change, except for this: (lowers the podium microphone).
[General audience tittering]
By the way, this bit about being the “quiet new urbanist”: I think that’s code for the fact that I couldn’t sell ice to the Ecuadorians.
Let’s press on. This is going to be the one-minute history lesson. I would propose it is simple, rather than simplistic, but I invite you all to challenge me on that. And, I think this complements nicely what Paul talked about. By the way, Mr. Reps, there is a missing picture: I sometimes introduce this with a picture of one of the bastides.
The first point is: Why did we do all this idiocy? Why did we plan such an incredibly stupid system? There were real reasons. And I take it back to the industrial revolution, which started having its effect on cities—what, 16th century? 17th? 18th?—sometime in the 18th or 17th centuries—we can debate that, but the industrial revolution produced unprecedented technical problems in the traditional city. Unprecedented concentrations of power, both political, literal concentrations of people, all that stuff that Dickens wrote about was a real problem. They were real problems. They were technical problems and, as Francisco Cenin taught me, unfortunately, fundamental solutions were applied: They threw the baby out with the bath water.
This is Ludwig Hilberseimer’s plan for Chicago. He did several of these. Ludwig is the guy that Mies van der Rohe brought over to teach Americans how to plan their cities. Unfortunately, we took the lessons far too well. These are smoke diagrams. It’s okay to get the smoke-producing industry away from where the rest of the city is; that makes sense; they’re dirty, noxious uses. But let’s zoom in on one of these little pods, and then let’s zoom in again—you can hear the "March of the Valkyries" in the background.
Okay, that’s where we’re going. Now, I added the color, but I would say this is where it comes in: zoning. Think about a zoning map. The place where you sleep is separated from the place where you work, is separated from the place where you shop, where your civic institutions are—all connected like an assembly line by the highway and the freeway. The interesting thing about this, if you ask me, is there is some irony here. The problems generated by mass production in the industrial revolution were attempted to be solved by applying that very logic to the city. But people are not widgets, nor Model Ts.
And here we go: From those few colors, we get to this hyper-confusion of colors. And by the way, when it gets on the ground, it’s a mess, because it’s all about keeping things apart. And we know that healthy towns and cities are about how things integrate. Generations of planners, very well intentioned, have spent years—their lives—doing layer upon layer of Band-Aid solutions onto a system that is fundamentally anti-urban.
So it’s about keeping things apart, not about keeping things together. And don’t let anyone tell you that what we’re about is putting more controls on people. That statement—“We don’t need any more controls”—I agree with. We need less. But right now, we hyper-control use and density in abstracts and statistical ways, and look at what we get. We hyper-control things we have no business hyper-controlling.
Now, at one point, this looked very sexy: the open-topped cars on the freeway, this fundamental change: traffic is going to replace formal planning. Well, we know the reality. A good example of this is the La Defense district in Paris, which, even in Paris, it ain’t so hot. There’s nothing romantic about getting stuck in traffic, whether the people are cursing at you in French, English, Spanish, or whatever. The system fundamentally is a technical failure.
But for some reason, we all got so excited about this, we applied fundamental solutions where there were technical problems. Places—I think this is a piece of New York—where they had serious economic problems, there was blight; instead of going in there and addressing the technicality and allowing them to evolve out of it, we bulldozed them and we applied a fundamental formal solution, something that’s antithetical. In the previous picture you had streets and blocks, fronts and backs, some kind of private space, some kind of public space; you don’t here. And we all know that when this stuff doesn’t work, because it’s such a fundamental problem, you have to apply a fundamental solution. And this is such a marvelously unfair slide, which is why it’s actually quite fair; Pruitt-Igoe—it didn’t work. Maybe when you put rich people in it, they can make it work, with a guard at the door, etc. It’s a social experiment that failed. But it made a terrific image.
This is a picture of what we’re doing today, making an argument that we need a better balance. In any regulation or control of human settlements, you have to deal with physical form (how big the buildings are, where they sit, what space they take up), use and density (which is a thing we deal with now almost to the exclusion of the other), and management (what time did the band stop playing on 11th Street? Is there on-street parking? Is there not? This day-to-day stuff that needs to be handled).
We would suggest this is what we’re doing today. We hyper-control use and density. Management is perhaps appropriate, although it’s made more problematic because of the clumsiness of our system. And form, if we get to it, which I think we’ve only done in recent generations, we get to it as an afterthought and as a sort of eye candy, eyewash, superficial things. It’s a very tiny tail wagging a huge dog.
We would propose this is the appropriate balance: You do not throw out use and density—there are still some basic balancing issues that need to be handled—but you really concentrate on form, because that’s the best determinant.
Katz:
The presentation we’re giving is an evolution of a number of talks that I’ve done over the years. Often, at the end of the talk, people are very convinced, but they say, “Peter, I don’t understand. What is the essence of what you’re talking about? If you could boil it down to the nub, the one thing that really defines what you and your colleagues are proposing vs. what we’re doing, explain that to me.”
And so I’m going to give you that here. But I have to tell you that the thing itself is quite un-spectacular. The difference is this: In the left-hand side, under zoning, what we’re controlling is zoning category, which is usually a letter and a number—in this case, R5. And that might be residential, five to the acre. And you’ll see that covers an area of maybe 20 blocks; you see large streets, small streets, but it’s all R5. The planner has invoked a very simple solution to the problem.
And then on the right, we’re dealing with a much smaller area, sometimes just a part of a block, but it might be a given building type: What we circled there is a type 9, but you’ll see other cases where there’s a type 6 or a combination of different types.
So let’s go through these two systems and trace the implications at one distinction.
Here we are looking at the actual neighborhood. That green line separates the R5 neighborhood in the upper part of the photo, from what might be the R6 or R8 or whatever, below. And you’ll see within that area a hodgepodge of things. Even though the planner has invoked a simple solution, what’s going on the ground is really kind of a mess, a hodgepodge of different things, most of which are grandfathered from an earlier time. But you do see the two newer buildings: that one large curved building, and then, farther back, a simple rectangular building? Those were built under the R5 regime, and yet you look at them and think, how can they be so different? The reason is, the big curved building is bigger because they’re building on a bigger lot. And the FAR (Floor Area Ratio) system means “bigger lot = bigger building.” That seems fair. And the smaller building, which is rectangular and pulled up to the street, behaves quite differently, but it follows the rules.
What’s happening is, the physical form is so unpredictable, that if you own property in that neighborhood, you know the density and the use, but physically, you’re all over the map. So if you’re trying to get a feel for what’s going on—should I build know or should I wait 10 years?—your tendency is going to be to wait. So for an economic development standpoint, the current system is not a good one because everybody is waiting to see what everybody else is going to do, because there is no real predictability in terms of a physical form.
Now, let’s venture up to New York City for a moment, to Greenwich Village, where they have a zoning category called R6. It’s obviously more than six units to the acre, but the R6 will give you these lovely brownstones. The R6 will also give you these high-rise towers, as of right. And again, you know, New York City had the towers and the park zoning, and they don’t happen to have height limits, but if you live in one of lovely brownstones and one day you come from work and you see the bulldozers tearing down a townhouse at the end of your street, they could be building one of those towers. And, as Andres famously says, “Those kinds of buildings will destroy your property values.”
And so, what is the default setting of every neighbor who lives in that community? They’re NIMBYs, as well they should be, because they’re protecting something really important. Very problematic: The R6 is creating such a large frame of what can happen that people simply don’t have any feeling of protection, based on the zoning.
Now, let’s venture out to the west coast. In this case, the red on the map denotes retail. And, indeed, the folks who created this zoning map, when they were thinking about it, that was the picture they had in mind: some lovely retail shops, perhaps in Santa Monica or Westwood. But what actually happens, when the developer shows up with the specific plan under their arm, is they’re proposing to build this kind of a place on that site: your typical conventional shopping center, backs up on the community, no connection.
I’ve been accused before, by Ellen, specifically, she says, “This is not a fair comparison.” But in fact, the principle is really true. There is an incredible amount of latitude under that thing called density and use, in terms of the physical form, and what people lack is the predictability of knowing what’s coming. At the moment the general plan is drafted, there is simply too much variation to give people any sense of predictability.
Let’s jump for a moment to the system we’re proposing—this form-based system. Again, the largest single determinant of form is probably building type. By “building type,” I mean distinctions like this. There’s a building type that we’d call a detached village or a house. We might call a row house a shopfront, a courtyard building a mid-rise building, a high-rise building. These are very simple descriptions of the form of a building, and often some information about how it behaves.
But not necessarily use. And this is a very tough concept to get in your mind, if it’s new to you—it took me awhile.
Now, that building type is usually indicated on a document like this—these were some of the early new urbanist codes, which were in the form of posters—and each row of the poster described a building type. And if you [look carefully], you’ll see that there is a section and a footprint, and a number of different diagrams that denote that type. But if I showed you this picture and said, “Here’s what we’re talking about, with that type 9,” you’d look at it and say, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I know those, I’ve seen those before. We have some of those on Main Street in our town.”
And you’ll see that, indeed, the description of the type will show you that you can be one module wide, two modules, or even three modules wide—you see, here’s one that’s one module wide, two, and three. So the width is not key to the type. And then here you see that buildings can be two stories or three stories high. So the height is not a key to the type. And in this case, the uses on the ground floor tend to be retail; in this case, the retail snuck up to the second floor; here, you have residential on the second floor; here, you have office—clearly, the uses can be somewhat interchangeable, but the type remains the type. So, we’re beginning to understand this concept.
Let’s go to another building type. And by the way—style? A lot of people think new urbanists are trying to code style. No. You can go through all of Geoff’s codes; you’ll rarely find the word “style” mentioned. But what you see here is, this is the New England version of that type; this is the Florida version. But it’s still the same type. So “type” is something that endures between these different features.
Another building type in the same neighborhood: This one’s a type 6B, and here you see the diagram of it—it’s a little complex to follow, but when I show you this picture, you say, “Oh, right, okay, one of those.” Well, it’s a house.
“Isn’t ‘house’ a use, Peter?”
Well, yeah, but, if you go to New England, at the main intersection you’ll see a masonry bank, but if you go three blocks in either direction, there will be a house that will house a beauty parlor, or a travel agency, or a restaurant, or a law firm. When business is good, that use will tend to creep down the streets. And when business is bad, they will tend to be reclaimed as housing. So it allows use to change without rendering the building useless. From an economic development standpoint, that’s a good strategy. It means that buildings can continue to function in their best possible way.
So again, if you go back to what’s the difference on the plan itself, it’s fairly insignificant: R5 here, type 9 there, but I’m going to show you in the next few minutes all of the myriad things that flow from this difference.
You got a hint of this when I showed you the image of that tower in Greenwich Village—this issue of FAR. Granted, these may be statistically identical in terms of FAR, but psychologically, these buildings have a huge, different impact on their surroundings. People have experienced that for years.
One of the things you’ll find with the current system of zoning is that your planners will be very reluctant to draw a picture of what’s really coming. What they’ll do is say, “Here, take the zoning document, go home and figure it out yourself, because it’s really quite flexible, and there are many options, and I really couldn’t tell you all the different forms.”
But if you press your officials or staffers, they will eventually draw you a picture called a “zoning envelope,” which describes what’s possible within that zoning category. It will have a setback; it will have a maximum height; it will, of course, have that use—not density; it might state the maximum number of curb cuts, but other than that, it will be very little information, very simple. And the planner will tell you, “we used to legislate aesthetics, but we got sued once, so we don’t do that anymore.”
Nevertheless, this zoning envelope tends to be the thing that people grab on to, because they’re desperate for some physical sense of what the place looks like. And it will tell them that on this street you can go up four stories, and on that street—but the problem is, everybody is thinking in terms of buildings as big, blank walls, and when they envision it, indeed, that is what a lot of people are building and the extend to which a blank wall three stories high is bad, five stories high will be even worse.
But what they’re not doing is envisioning those walls as being fabulous places, full of life, full of windows looking in to people’s homes—not in an [invasive] way—but the idea that it’s really a human habitat and could be quite wonderful. Unfortunately, in that discussion, people always assume the worst.
Those blank walls of that earlier slide: As I said, government is very reluctant to go anywhere beyond this simple zoning envelope. But in some communities, particularly in more affluent communities, citizens will press them and they’ll say, “This blank wall thing—they just built a Wal-Mart in our town, and it looks like that! It’s blank walls all around! You’ve got to give us some laws to protect us from that.”
So eventually, planners will accede and say, “We’re going to give you design guidelines. We’re going to layer on top of that zoning—the 50 pages you already have—another 80 pages that dictate the guidelines for this place.” And often what those guidelines are concerned with is something called “surface articulation”—the idea that no wall can go more than 60 feet without turning in seven feet, that you must have different materials from the top to the bottom of the building, that you must have frequent porches, frequent balconies, corners—all these things. And again, to quote Andres, “What you’re basically asking the developer to do is to make a very expensive building that’s probably going to leak.” Because every time you change materials, every time you do a corner, every time you do all those jigs and jogs—you know you have to flash those details—you’re creating places for water to get into the building and to create problems. Those of you who are developers know this.
Why do people ask for this? They ask for this because this is what they thought they saw on their vacation in Europe last summer. But if they went back and looked at their photographs, they would see a series of buildings that were flat-fronted, simple in proportion, that basically used every square inch of property they had, buildings that were actually typologically quite similar between one and the next, though they varied in color, style, height, detailing. In this case, it looks like the ground-floor uses are all similar. So in fact, what we’re asking for and what we’re seeking are really two very different things. And the problem is, too many people making decisions in conference rooms, late at night, and not actually getting out and observing their communities.
We tend to use these guidelines in places where there’s a lot of public focus. In the case of Mizner Park, you had an existing community, you had a place that was being redeveloped, and a lot of people cared about it, so a lot of people came to the meetings, and guidelines were drawn. One of the problems with these guidelines is that guidelines are often the starting point of a negotiation process. They’re full of words like “compatibility,” “harmony”—good-sounding words, but very slippery from a legal standpoint, very hard to define.
Here’s an example of some very creative guidelines documents—some of these were in my book. I certainly applaud the creativity of architects and designers who have done these things. I think one of the most impressive ones was Disney’s pattern book (for Celebration), done by UDA. There’s a handful of copies floating around among members of this group—they’re quite sought-after.
But the problem with a document like this, as beautiful as it is, is that—what do you suppose happens when you show a document like this to the builders of a place like Celebration? Anybody have any idea? Disney poured thousands of dollars in fees into this beautiful document. Any idea what happened?
The builders all walked out of the room. They said, “You’re asking us to build an affordable community, and yet you’re dictating wood trim details to us. Now, come on. You’re telling us our business. We know how to build a reasonable house.”
Not to take away from the pattern book! Anybody here—your firms to pattern books? Well, again, UDA: Very fine firm. Beautiful publication. But it has that problem. And what Disney had to do with their builders is put them on a plane, take them up to Beaufort, S.C., walk them around Newpoint, and show them: “This is what we’re going for.”
And the builders looked at the detailing of the porches, they saw that these were simple 4x4 posts, and they said, “Yeah, we can do that. No problem.” The “builder macho” kicked in: “Hey, no problem.” So at any rate, there is that danger.
One of the other things about the pattern book is that two very different things are included on the same page: This deals with massing and orientation to the street. And yet, these are wood trim details. So there is a hierarchy of importance that needs to be expressed here, that I think the form-based codes tend to do.
And, of course, after the pattern book was produced, several months later, Celebration happened. They eventually worked through this. But getting the place codified was key to building it.
This is the system that we’re advocating here. You’ll notice that that R40 went away—you’re not going to see that anymore in the presentation. What you’re looking at here is a roofscape at a normal community—this could be a bite taken out of Portland, Ore., or a small town in Massachusetts or the Midwest. You’re seeing larger buildings on a busy street, small buildings on a side street; it’s a normal, sort of random roofscape.
You look at that and initially you say, “That’s not coded, it’s just sort of a variety. It’s diversity.” But when you analyze it, you realize that it breaks down into several little subdistricts, each of which have their own building types. We’re going to analyze this very closely, but what’s interesting about this approach is that, from my understanding of the way this came about, DPZ’s office sort of stumbled on this idea of types when they were creating Seaside. They knew that developer Robert Davis wasn’t going to pay them to design every building in the town—I wish Andres were in the room to keep me honest on this explanation.
Robert said, “I’m not going to pay you to design every building.” And they had all these friends who were architects, who they wanted to involve, and they said, “We need a way to basically curb their excesses—have some variety, but still have some larger order.”
Andres Duany:
The actual story—
Katz:
Okay, but you need a microphone for this, though. Bill, we’re off the clock on this part!
Duany:
The actual story is an important philosophical one. We had done a prior project that urbanistically was quite good, called Charleston Place. By some miracle we had actually achieved a lot of the urban ideals. The problem with it was that we had designed all of the buildings. And that was very much its failure, because what we realized was that you cannot falsify variety. So it was by the same hand; you can tell it was by the same hand.
It also tends to be a monoculture: If any of those buildings had failed—and perhaps they will, one day—they will fail as a monoculture will fail. All the roofs will give way, or all the garages will be small at the same time. That’s what happens in the inner-ring suburbs.
In Seaside, we initiated. There was nothing more convenient, or better business, or more convenient for Robert, than for us to do all the buildings. But what we wanted to do was bring in as many designers as possible. And that is one of the reasons that Seaside is so well known. It’s because there’s a lot to see; it keeps you walking block after block after block. There are many new urbanists that do beautiful projects, where you see architecture that is superior to Seaside’s, but it’s by one hand, so it’s boring. This is a big discussion, internally.
Katz:
What was interesting to me is, they’ve stumbled on this approach, but then, as I understand it, several years later, leafing through the file drawers at Coral Gables City Hall, they found documents and early drawings for Coral Gables, where a very similar system was used. And all those great 1920s communities—Country Club Plaza, Roland Park—the system used by the great and heroic urban designers was very similar. Indeed, this is the closest we can get to the kind of authentic variety you find in Old Town Alexandria, which, indeed, had its own coding mechanisms.
So let’s take a close look at this. Let’s go through this block and understand the pieces that make it up.
Let’s start first with this group of shopfront buildings. Remember what I said about design guidelines and words like “compatibility”? Well, look at this one-and-a-half-story house here, with this great big four-story storefront building right next to it. One of the things about the suburbs, where you have a lot of land, it’s very forgiving: You can buffer everything with green. If you keep things 300 feet apart, uses are never going to interfere with each other. But cities need to be more economical in the use of land. And normally, if this was proposed, and you were living in your one-and-a-half-story house, you could take those guidelines and go to the court and say, “This is not compatible with my house,” and you could get this struck down.
But in cities, these buildings are doing another job for you. This is a busy, congested, noisy, smelly street, and what this building does is it blocks all that for the people who live here, and creates a very quiet side street. So that building is actually doing a different job. And those buildings, indeed, are those same shopfront buildings that I showed you before. I showed you the New England version and the L.A. version—well, this is the Chicago version of that same building type.
Let’s continue around the block. By the way, when you’re selecting a building type—a lot of times, the architects will specify not one building type, but two or three—what you’re doing is you’re basically choosing the buildings based on frontage, what kinds of buildings are going to front that street in a proper way to give it enough height, enough closure, and so on. And as it happens, there’s a completely different building type—this courtyard building—that’s actually quite compatible with these shopfronts. Because here, you can have a single elevator servicing a building three times the size. It’s not efficient to put little elevators in every building, so these might be walk-ups, but if this is housing, the elevator is really useful and because the form puts the arms of the building forward, each one of these arms is about the scale of each one of those buildings, so it’s compatible. But it’s compatible by design.
You’ll notice downstairs, we don’t know what that use is. If you’ll look closely at the code, up above you’ll see residential or office for use; below, residential or commercial. And the fact is, if that use upstairs changes from office to residential, the impacts will be management impacts. You’ll have fewer parking spaces on the street during the day if it’s office; if it’s residential, those will free up, and people who work in offices nearby can be there. There’s an advantage to separating use management and form, because you can manipulate those things separately.
The other thing about use is it’s very emotional. If there’s a restaurant down here—people can tell you a hundred things they hate about restaurants: the smell, the wrong sort of people hanging out, the parking problems—but in fact, what they really hate is the form. If it’s a Burger King, they don’t like the way it works. But if it’s a wonderful French restaurant and they can go there in the evening, they love it. So de-linking those things is very useful.
As we go around the block on that beautiful, tree-lined boulevard, we have those large homes. And again, to quote Brother Andres, “You need to keep wealthy people in the city,” and these kinds of buildings do that.
On the back street, an avenue, less busy than this one, you have row houses. One of the curious things about block geometries is it’s often very hard to turn a corner with the same building type, such as row houses. Row houses want backyards; when you turn a corner with them, you end up with a gap, where you have to have a backyard. A lot of times, like these single family homes with the backyards, you want to quiet down the backyard. And a lot of times, your busy traffic will be on the end streets. And so by going to a solid building type, such as a row house, you’re able to completely block that off. So there’s a lot of issues of how you turn the corner, that you can address when you have more flexibility here.
Finally, this side street is cottages.
This system is wonderful, and I could stand here for two more hours and tell you all the great things about it. But what I’m going to do is focus on just one issue right now: affordability. Something that people are always squawking about at community meetings.
What’s interesting is if you survey this block—let’s just look at all of the options delivered. Here is your high-end, large home, for wealthier people that you want to keep in cities. Here is the next level down: these are cottages—a little humbler. On that back street you have row houses; we don’t know if they’re bigger or smaller, but it’s another option for people who don’t want to maintain a big yard. Let’s call this courtyard building an apartment building—maybe less elegant, but also, above the street are these units above the store. We’re delivering five different unit types in a single block, but wait a minute, we’ve got something else here—what are those guys in the back? We’ve got granny units! There’s actually a sixth type in back there, that I didn’t picture.
This variety of building types—all of which are delivered by design rather than by law, and each of which is owned by a different entrepreneur—are a great way to create a much greater variety of housing possibilities within a single block. And that is [contrasted with] the system we now use, where we create affordability by law. One developer is doing a single, full-block building, we mandate by law that they must carve off 15 percent of the units as affordable housing. Guess who subsidizes that? Any idea who subsidizes the 15 percent affordable? The other 85 percent who live in the building! And those people are pissed! They look up at the balconies and they see the snow tires piled up in the summer, or the barbecue grill in the winter, and they say, “Don’t those people know how to store their equipment? Why are they different from us?” There are always these tensions when there are subsidized and nonsubsidized, and you know that the city has a department that has to review all those leases, and the minute that administrator goes away, you know that it’s going to default back to a market-rate condition.
So what we’re doing is we’re creating a city bureaucracy to enforce affordability when this other system does it naturally: Those units are affordable the day they’re built, and they stay affordable forever, because it’s in the best interest of this property owner to rent out that granny flat, because these units are naturally tailored toward certain markets, and there are many more entrepreneurs, rather than that single owner.
As you consider these two systems in totality, there are some interesting approaches.
Robert Davis once said to me, standing and looking at Seaside: “Who would have thought that all of these different designs would have resulted from the code? I could never have imagined it!”
What you have here is a very tight regulatory framework, creating a lot of variety of individual invention.
Here, what you have is a system of mass production that says, “We will achieve economies of scale by being big.” The financial world likes “bigness,” because of the old saying, “It’s as easy to do a $300 million deal as [it is to do] a $30 million deal, so let’s do the $300 million deal. I mean, the brain damage we have to go through to get this thing approved—let’s just do it for the biggest piece of land we can.” And of course, the city, they don’t have a lot of staff, and as I said, guidelines represent the starting point for negotiations—not the end point. So the last thing they want to do is deal individually with every property owner up and down the street. They want to take a big piece of land, six blocks, get it on the tax rolls quickly, because they know they have to go through all of these meetings. So that’s what they do.
So you have the producer side, the developers and finance people, and the city—all of whom are in agreement about bigness—but what citizens like is the fine-increment, small-scale, “charming” place that is produced when individual property owners do their own thing. And in fact, this does not require the discretionary design review. The planning commission: Thank you very much for your years of service; you can go home now. We have a tight enough regulatory framework to deliver a predictably good place, because we’ve really worked the rules through.
One other thing: These battles that occur are typically around density and use, but often density. But guess who won, in this picture here. Guess who won the battle over density. The citizens won. Look at how low density that is. So the developer is not going to make a lot of money; therefore, they can’t afford to hire a different architect to do different buildings, they can’t afford the good landscaping, the nice materials—even the pavers for the walkways. They’re stuck with one plan that they’re going to cookie-cut, you know: flip it, flop it, move it around, but basically, they’re stuck. And that’s the way we achieve affordable housing in the suburbs today, is this “mass production” that nobody really cares for.
The density is low, but when you stand in the center of that, that’s not what you’re feeling; you’re feeling incredibly bored, because every building around you is the same.
There’s one other important point about this, and this was touched on before: When people write these general plans, if they’re policy documents, they don’t really know what’s coming, whether it’s going to look like that or like that. They don’t even know where the streets are.
A new urbanist plan requires that you lay out the streets in blocks, that you have a plan, that you then assign things to that plan. So you can actually draw a picture that is accurate within two or three floors of what’s really coming. Whereas down here, you haven’t a clue; you don’t even know where to begin.
So the ability to work with the public process and actually do drawings in a charrette that are reasonably predictive of what’s coming, is a great advantage of the form-based coding system.
With this, Geoffrey’s going to gallop through the next part.
Ferrell:
Briefly, let’s look at how these codes work. First of all, they are full of judgment and looking at all thing. Tradition—nothing, by virtue of being old, is, therefore, good. Modernism—which is a misnomer; it was modern when my grandfather was young; he’s so old now, he’s not alive—is old-fashioned. You can never justify anything by saying it’s new. You can use a form-based code to code dingbats, high-rises, weird things on piloti—always keep in mind these form-based codes are about urban form: towns, cities, and villages.
First of all, like any kind of code, there’s a map that tells you where it goes, and then there’s a set of rules that show what the rules are for a given site. And suggest in form-based coding there a series, if you go to a sufficient level of abstraction—we’re talking here about the building envelope—there are a limited number of types. If you’re an architect, you can say there are 5,700 types or 57; I say there are many fewer than that, but here’s an example where for this piece there are three. “Workplace” being the place where you work.
In these codes they talk in highly diagrammatic and abstracted ways—the point about giving the attorneys very little to argue about needs to be underscored here. They’re not pretty drawings, but they’re simple drawings. There’s a meaning to where the arrows point. The diagrams are also paired with words, where there is sometimes healthy redundancy. Height, siting, where you have to build, perhaps, or where you may build. Some things you control absolutely; some things you give parameters [for].
What are the building elements, things like porches, window fenestration levels—and I would say here that these should not be about style; these should be about functional elements. The percentage of fenestration on a main street building is not about style; it’s about how that building functions, whether it works or not.
And finally, parameters for uses. There is a logic to how uses relate to being on the ground level on a busy street vs. being on the third floor, quiet streets back inside a neighborhood—but these are parameters. And I’m thinking in terms of public policy, here. I would suggest the government does not have any business micro-managing uses. A developer with a brand-new project? Yes, you want to get that guy kick-started; there is some logic there to micro-managing.
I’d love for someone else to get a great grant and do studies of codes in the United States, but what we seem to be finding—what we found in the study of Chicago—is that the great parts of American cities were sure as hell not built by Euclidean zoning codes. They were built by something earlier than that.
This is Chicago’s code from 1903—a piece of it in a vault. We learned that in 1957, which I remember because that’s the year I was born, the City of Chicago went to Euclidean zoning. As an example, in their B and C categories, in 1956 they had about four use categories and about four volume categories. In 1957, they had 57 use categories in B and C. It’s absurd.
But the great American cities—the great parts of our towns, cities, villages, and neighborhoods—were built not with the current system that we’re trying to fit them into now; they were built with an earlier system. It’s a combination of common understanding, but also rules. There always had to be rules; people didn’t just magically build to the right place on the street, on their own. They had some understanding that that was where you’d build, but you had to tame the tendency for people to grab a little bit more. So there were always some kind of rules, there. And they were primarily about form; loosely about use.
This is an example of a code that really focuses on the street. The code for a given site is based on what your frontage is, because a street is a holistic place (both sides relate to one another, etc.), so to use this code, you see what your color on the map is: that will tell you, “I’m fronting on the green street” (which we call a main street in this case; this is Columbia Pike, which is a major corridor leading into D.C.), so you know that’s a place where you’re going to go into the code.
And what do the codes control? Well, they make judgments about places. This is part of a great neighborhood in Chicago; this is a great main street of one of Chicago’s many neighborhoods. What makes it great? Let’s think about it in terms of height. There is some variation in terms of height. There is not absolute agreement, but there’s variation. That’s what the code should do as well: You make some judgments—what are minimums and what are maximums? You need to make the street space: When is too tall, too tall? And when you get it wrong, you can go overboard; there are limits.
Looking at that same street, you see the heights vary. I would suggest the architect varies a lot.
And by the way, did the uses of these buildings, the specific use zones, or the specific FAR make this a great place? No, because these buildings have been around long enough that their specific use zone and their density category changed several times. So that has nothing to do with what makes this a great place, outside of the basic parameter: This is a main street; the ground floor is a place for commerce.
In terms of siting, one thing those buildings agree on, to beat the band, they all sit right up against the street; they make that consistent street wall. And the codes, if you’re trying to make this kind of street, you have not a permissive setback, you have a required building line. Simple. You can be looser about what happens in the back, but here’s what happens when you get that backwards: You have a setback and you put the things that should be in the back, in the front. And, by the way, notice the expensive public infrastructure on the sidewalk, which any human being would be uncomfortable sitting at, waiting for the bus.
Humans walk in straight lines, at least for short lengths, and look what happens to this image as you move the buildings up to the street. You start to imagine that human being not feeling really out of place, and you can start to imagine other people being there. The same buildings go from being places where you’d expect to see tires piled up outside, to places where you can understand walking down that street. And now you can understand people being on this street, just by rearranging the buildings. And I would pose that the architectural fancies here are of last importance; that’s icing on the cake.
Another thing that happens when you put the building forward on the lot: Not only do you get the good street, but look at the space in the back of the lot. Now, in a perfect world, that is where you put gardens, trees, greenery—by the way, it also gives you breathing room when you change uses around the corner. From the main street, if you have the first house on the residential street behind that, it’s a comfortable relationship; it’s breathing room between uses, so when you change uses, that’s what should be an alley. There’s not a four-story building looking into your backyard where you’re trying to get a suntan. In a perfect world, these are gardens; in an imperfect world, it’s where we put the garbage and the parking lot. But you make the good street.
Here’s what happens when you get it backwards. Which is better in terms of value, in any way you want to think about the word: long-term value for the community, tax base, as a human being occupying the space. Elements—it’s not about style, but it’s about function. There’s a different use. On a commercial street, you want the public and the private to interplay; you want them to interpenetrate. On a residential street, you don’t; you want the residences to look out over the street. So the code has to deal with that directly: If this is a main street, you have minimums and maximums for fenestration on that, because that’s the way the street works—you avoid blank walls. It’s different on the upper stories, where you have offices or residential. In Chicago—this is a former neighborhood, called Streeterville—they built about 40 of these suckers before they put yet another Band-Aid on their code, because their code wasn’t thinking about urbanity, it was thinking about statistics—Band-Aid upon Band-Aid.
Emphasizing you can put a form-based code to any garbage, but remember, these are about “urbs,” and urbs are about the interaction between the public and the private realm at the street edge.
Here’s an example of some places in Chicago, where, despite having great models—
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[BEGIN TAPE]
This should make you sick. Here, the basic form is right, but where the hell is the street? Look at that lonely person. And just to the right of the picture, you see where the old pattern, where the street was fronted. Probably, the developer could squeeze in one more unit here. So he did it this way. But the codes were not about making urban space. [Unintelligible]
And here’s a place; there’s tons of architecture here, tons of money—the problem with this dwelling is not its style, although I haven’t found a great use for glass block yet. But the fact that when you walked through that wall, in a completely different realm—it’s good to separate public and private, but there’s no overlook. This is like Professor Carroll William Westfall talks about I think, Quito, is a city that has this pattern, and he relates that to the problems with democracy, the public and the private. In residential, the private needs to overlook the public. That’s policing, “eyes on the street,” etc., etc.
This place, they got it right. It’s not about the style, although it does look sort of, kind of, traditional.
Finally, uses. I think this is the example where it’s the exception that proves the rule. There is a logic to retail that it has its own logic; it requires synergy; it’s something that you would control and try to keep in a certain place, but as you notice, in this code, on the ground floor it says “office or retail.” The code for height that would go with this would mandate a minimum clear height that would allow that to always be a very comfortable retail establishment because retail, when the economy is there, retail pays more money for its space than office does. So you can set up a retail street; if the economy isn’t there, offices in it are fine. When the economy is there for retail, retail will come because it has capitalism at the small scale—it’s a wonderful thing.
The picture in the upper right: Somebody got this right in Chicago. Downtown Chicago—the use that’s important here is retail. Terribly busy; this is in The Loop. Most people probably think that that’s an apartment, some kind of modernist thing up there, maybe somebody lives up there. It’s actually a huge piece of public infrastructure.
Katz:
A power plant.
Ferrell:
A power plant—one of those things. But they got it right and the street works seamlessly because they understood that.
Uses. Under the current system—we’re going to do something dramatic—this is a scene in Versailles, Ky., central Kentucky. We’re going to change the color on the map. Right now, the color on the map is some kind of yellow, because it’s residential; we’re going to change it to some kind of red. Keep your eye on this place. And also watch the reaction of the people on the street as we do this. Under the current system of Euclidean zoning, we’re going to make a fundamental change, here.
(The only thing that changes is a small sign appears high on the building façade. Of course, there is no hint of reaction from the pedestrians.)
Notice how the people react. (Laughter) Because you’ve controlled the form, we can say they’re nonplussed. Because you’ve controlled the form—the scale, the parking, etc.—it’s managed so that it’s not an Applebee’s or whatever—Country Cookin’—surrounded by parking, or a dentist’s office with a huge parking lot. It fits in. The uses changed, and this dentist’s office is probably a very good neighbor because they might be there during the day, when the people across the street aren’t.
Street types. I would suggest that you don’t code street types—you design them. There’s a difference between coding, where you set parameters. When we do projects and there are all sorts of different types of streets in new urbanism, from the mega-urban, big-city main street, neighborhood local streets, they all have to make a balance between the mobility of the automobile and people in other means, like on foot, bicycles, etc. And the balance changes, depending on the street type. But I suggest we have to be very specific about that. And it’s not setting up guidelines; it’s specific designs. You have to tell the engineers what the curb radii is—well, some engineers, you don’t have to tell them that, but generally, you do or they’ll default to the truck standards.
Street trees. New urbanists need a spanking for the way they do street trees. We stick them in the ground, we don’t give them enough soil, they die in seven to ten years. Street trees, with rare exception, are 50 percent of urban design. And they need to be put in the ground in a way that they might actually live. We need to be highly specific about their placement, so they help make space. There are people who know how to do these things. Trees need soil surface area, however you give it to them. They don’t need depth. You put them in a little tree well and it’s like putting them in a small pot. They’ll be rootbound in a few years, and then they’ll just slowly fade away.
Think about the value in terms of as a citizen who has to walk down this street. As a public official, tax base, etc. The street with and without. In this case, it’s really simple in this environment to get the trees to grow. You rototill the entire planting strip, you stick the trees in the ground—they’re probably going to do very well. I know it’s different here in New Mexico, but . . .
Here’s a more difficult situation, but look at the value of this place by the simple means of—sidewalks will get a little bit wider, too—by the simple means of the street space-making capabilities, and shade-making of street trees. There are technical ways to do this. It’s more expensive, but if you look at it in terms of the value created, the money needed to make the trees live is a drop in the bucket.
Finally, here’s another place. Wonderful. It’s actually a tight street. It looks a little bit rough. Simple street trees; these trees are not that big. Improvements in the public realm can, as we all know, foster improvements in the private realm.
Katz:
Okay, we’ve talked about building type and street type. It’s important to match the two. And this issue of block structure is very important. In this neighborhood, as we mentioned, the one zoning category might be covering 20 blocks, with large streets and small streets going through them. It’s important that we treat them differently.
When you look at this block, your first thought is, gee, that looks awfully boring; they should have gotten more architects to design the different units. But I would wager that it’s not a problem of the architecture. The problem has to do with the fact that you slice the sausage off, here, and you’re fronting a very large regional street. This part of the block doesn’t look too bad, but this end view looks really raw. You’ve got these backyards—the most private space of the block—leaking out to this big street. You’ve got a blank wall here; you look at that and say, “Nobody would ever put a blank wall like that.” But, indeed, in that photograph they had done just that. Folks say, “I don’t want to look out at that busy street.” So you have a miserable experience for the people living on the end and the people traveling the street.
Well, there are good urban design tricks we can do to mitigate that. One is, to take the entrance of this building and swing it around the side. But the problem is, we end up losing the backyard, here. And in this case, what we’ve done, I don’t know if you saw the move, but we add a window, and we make the side of this more interesting. We punch another window in there, but again, the last thing you really want to do is weaken—the problem is one of privacy, so why would you put more windows in here?
So the problem with this big street needs to be addressed through urban design. And there are mechanisms. But the zoning here says, “No more than X units to the acre,” which will give you these large houses and these small houses, and the theory is, well of course, we want to protect the people here from big, awful buildings that are going to cast shadows and create density and all that.
Well, wait a second. What the block really needs is what’s called an “endcap building.” A building to kind of seal off the end of the block. It has a bit more mass; its frontage wraps around a little bit better; it narrows up the gap, giving more privacy in those backyards. But the problem is, this building violates the zoning for that neighborhood: It’s too dense. And so, it’s illegal. Now, what I would say is, rather than worry about the illegality, let’s create a set of rules that actually allows us to sort of “micro-zone” the end of those blocks, so you have one kind of street running this way, and another kind of street running that way.
Now, as a physical design concept, that makes a lot of sense. And new urbanists are very well equipped to do that sort of thing. So what you’ve got now is this endcap building. And by the way, there’s a rule of acoustics that basically says if you bash a hole in the wall (20 percent of the area of the wall), 80 percent of the sound goes through. So that gap that existed between the buildings—when you close up the gap, now you’ve created real privacy in the backyards. And oddly enough, that big building actually makes these more private. The frontage of this stacked flat building now wraps around the block and creates pretty tight gaps. And by stepping the building down, you begin to address some of the problem of overlooking into the backyards.
But more important than the physical side of what this new building type adds to the neighborhoods—that cookie-cutter look that we saw in the first slide is now gone—is what happens socially. With the addition of just one building type, now you have a street where somebody can raise a family in a large home. And this might be where they live when they’re older or when they’re a younger couple, struggling to make the house payments. And then, perhaps, in your senior years, you might live here at the senior center. This might be where your son or daughter lives when they come back from college. It has the opportunity for retail—suddenly, this single block becomes a lifetime neighborhood; you don’t have to up and restart your life all over again, two miles away, in a different neighborhood, which is where singles live, or where seniors live, or where family lives. It keeps that social dislocation to a minimum.
And the crazy thing about it—you look at this, it looks like a happy, healthy neighborhood. But that’s not what we build these days. We build these homogenous, one or two building types—solves the whole—this is what Habitat for Humanity does, HUD and their Hope VI—often, it’s just airdropping one type. And the crazy thing is, it’s not like it costs more to do this; it just requires different rules. And in fact, it generates a whole lot more value because the pad underneath that building, rather than being an undesirable place, is now a more desirable place. And indeed, this is the pattern you find on Chicago’s great old boulevards. So I suggest we change the rules to let us build better neighborhoods.
Now again, on this issue of frontage, there’s a certain way that retail buildings front the street that is different from that of private residences, different from that of public buildings, and the codes help us agree on a simple thing like the fact that we’re going to have a stoop, say, on the front of a townhouse. The buildings are going to have their fronts facing the street. It’s a small detail, but go and look at what Frank Lloyd Wright did out at Oak Park. Little by little, the entrances moved around to the side; the buildings became more and more street unfriendly.
And a little bit of a questionnaire, here: front or back? Well, happens to be a back of a building. But look at the money they spent; look at the beautiful materials. Wasted on only the people who live in the alley.
Again, what’s this? Well, that’s a back; this is a front. See, you have private rooms looking into public rooms. It’s all wacky. This is a tower that could easily anchor a town square somewhere. And the money spent is, again, wasted in this location.
How about this one? Any idea? Front or back? Well, it is a front. But look: All the money they spent on that tower, they couldn’t put here. They had the money for the pavers, but this: the cheapest kind of Dryvit and garage doors. So we’re very confused about this issue of front and back.
Again, we looked at this image before. They’ve got the fronts, it’s just not on a street. Here’s a classic case of a developer, building in Tennessee. They didn’t happen to like the street; they thought it was a bit too busy. So they said, “We’re just going to put our buildings facing the center of the block. We’re going to put the backs to the outside, and we will build a sound wall.” Which basically means that if the street was sort of marginal, then by having the sound wall here you’re clearly causing it to kind of “crater” as a public place.
By the way, all these computer images are the work of Steve Price, who is our third collaborator—a company called Urban Advantage, in California. So we’re going to put the entries where they belong, we’re going to put some street trees, we’re going to put up some picket fences. We still have the wall for the backyard, which needs privacy. And lo and behold, suddenly you have Chevy Chase, Maryland. It might be a busy street, but at least you have the possibility of rescuing it in some way, as a place. And what it means is that even though that guy might have made a little more money by facing the entries in, he ruins the street for everybody else.
Now, the flip side of urban living: Even though one may have a very public front, often, urban living delivers a wonderful backyard. And the great thing about the Chicago plan is, 200 years ago when they laid it out, they were thinking about backyards. And again, the codes will often specify: You have a backyard. In my community of Alexandria, Va., they’re getting rid of backyards because the developers can make extra money by cramming in an extra row of units. Well, that’s great while real estate values are really running high, but there is going to come a day when having a backyard maintains the values of the neighborhood.
That same focus on public space in the plan, that worked out in the far neighborhoods. Downtown in The Loop, there was also a lot of thought about how to bring air and light and ventilation into that block. And these quarter-block buildings—these dumbbell buildings—actually did a great job of that. And not only that, but by keeping the buildings out to the sidewalk, you created a great space for retail.
Decisions about heights of buildings in Chicago have consequences that deal with millions and billions of dollars. And unfortunately, the way we’re building today is different from those street-wall buildings. It may be more picturesque from a distance, but as you begin to look closer into the little interstices here, you realize that there are problems brewing. Here’s one of those street-wall buildings. It’s very evident what part of the building was meant to touch the building next to it. Not so clear on those modern buildings, which have a curtain wall going all the way around. There’s a game of architectural chicken that goes on, where one developer says, “I dare you to get too close to me!” Because what happens is, the first guy comes and builds right up to the property line, or as close as the rules allow. The next guy has to stay back, otherwise, there’s no value; there’s no light coming in. But they’re all spending all that money upholstering all sides of their buildings with these expensive curtain walls.
Even more problematic is the fact that by not restricting people to the sidewalk, like you do here, you allow a lot of space for people to filter around. This shot was taken at 5:00 p.m. on a Thursday—and people attempt to deal with all that empty space with artwork, and so on and so forth, but you always end up with those dead pockets where retail doesn’t work, cleaning off graffiti, replacing light bulbs. It seemed like a great idea at the time, lifting the buildings up on piloti, but nowadays, we realize it’s just a maintenance headache, and doesn’t create really nice places.
So as I said, millions of dollars hangs in the balance. And this gets very political. We would wager a sort of solution actually based on precedent—the idea that maybe the lower part of the building follows the street-wall format, and above a certain datum you can let loose and do whatever you want, but important to maintain that retail. With air conditioning, you can now have these atriums where an office can face into an internal atrium and it’s not a horrible place.
Everything we’ve talked about up to this point deals with 80 percent of the issue: the architectural code, the big issues of how do the buildings relate to one another and to the sidewalk. There’s another level—the top 20 percent—that Geoffrey calls the “dress code,” which has to do with the finer points. Things like what kind of windows you have in a historic bungalow. And is it a bowtie or a necktie? And the architectural code—this is the kind of thing that most people think new urbanists are maniacs about—is really just trying to emulate the best of the older neighborhoods we admire. Go to Iowa City, look at what makes a great front porch, try to write a code that basically asks for that in terms of the new construction. Usually very simple things that one asks for.
There are a number of different techniques within form-based coding. There’s the building type approach, or what some people call the typological approach, where you lay out the streets and blocks, and you assign types to given development sites. And you generally describe those types in fairly great detail.
There’s a second approach—and this is where you all can help us out, because these names are names that we’ve just recently coined. What we call the “public realm approach,” where your focus is on the street. Essentially, rather than the “additive approach” of placing buildings on sites, now what you’re doing is carving the streets away, you’re carving away the public realm. And in this case, your building types are a little bit more abstract, a little bit more diagrammatic.
And then there’s actually a third, hybrid, approach, where basically what you’re doing is you’re laying out the streets and blocks. You’re saying, “These are the building types,” but in this case—this is actually a development in Iowa City that I’m working on, called The Peninsula, you actually propose a system called “rods,” which gives a great deal of flexibility in terms of you could lay out a block this way, or you could lay it out this way. And the theory is that the developer has the last word in terms of what’s the most economically viable. You can work with your economist and jigger the mix of building types six different ways to see which one works best with your pro forma. And each of those three approaches has different implications in terms of—if the city’s driving it they may want one; if a developer’s driving it, they may want another.
Really, the bottom line on all this is that typological codes basically let you take the streets you like, the building types you like—it lets you emulate the great places in your community, find out the important things and duplicate them, and take the places you don’t like and code against them.
Just to show you what this would mean to a place like Chicago—these are some of those before-and-after images. Here’s the way they’re building in the Clybourne Corridor. Everybody’s delighted about the economic development happening, the fact that there are stores and shopping centers opening, but they’re turning Chicago into L.A. And yet, Chicago could maintain a pattern consistent with its DNA and have all the same program uses. And the parking.
These are the blank walls in Streeterville. Guess what they’re fighting about in Streeterville? Building heights. Well, I maintain that building heights have very little to do with what makes this a lousy street. In fact, it’s what’s really on in the first four floors that are not being controlled by the codes.
Farther out in the neighborhoods, places that used to have great concentrations of development, eroded away by parking lots, well, you can replace the buildings and put them back, very much in the pattern they once were. And create great outlying neighborhoods.
Chicago is concerned about maintaining its industry. Here are some of those great industrial buildings; those can be anchors for neighborhoods.
Here’s an example we through in—this is actually not Chicago, but closer to where I live: Columbia Pike—you saw the back of a Safeway; here is how the new code created by Ferrell Associates and Dover Kohl would begin to start to infill that street with buildings that feel comfortable and compatible. And note that it’s note a style issue; watch that building on the corner changing from one style to another. It’s still obeying the same code imperatives.
The question is, how does this all fit into the larger context?
When you start to deal with a whole region, probably the first thing you need to do is create some type of a regional strategic plan, identifying the big, region-wide elements: the highways, the rivers, the lakefront—those things that can’t be changed. Identify a handful of neighborhoods that have regional significance, and probably address them from a design standpoint as neighborhoods. You define a library of buildings types for the Chicago region, of which maybe you choose some for certain neighborhoods and others for others, and you begin to basically define the centers and edges of other neighborhoods, and you say, “These are neighborhoods we’ll get to later.”
The process needs to be a very public process. Citizens need to be involved and, I would dare say, even choose their own consultants. One of the issues that’s happening in Chicago is the aldermen are very frustrated because development isn’t moving forward in the way that it used to. And what I believe really needs to happen is we reclaim a lot of big, empty spaces, and begin to turn them into neighborhoods, providing the housing that people really want in their neighborhoods, and the YMCAs, the shopping, the main streets—these are the kinds of things that aldermen would probably want to promote, because it means development.
And again, looking back at Chicago’s history, it had a lot of great chapters in its development that were very much physically driven. It’s really only been in the last 50 or so years that we had this sort of policy-driven approach, which really, on the ground, has not yielded great places.
And to probably end the presentation with the most clichéd line from any presentation you’ve every seen—this is a line you’ve all heard before, from a person you may or may not be familiar with—Daniel Burnham—but this quote, “Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men’s blood,” came from Chicago’s planning effort. It has a very heroic tradition of planning, and yet, folks in Chicago are attempting to turn their city around and continue to perpetuate the greatness of Chicago, using a system that has already been discredited. And so I maintain that one needs to go back to that fork in the road, to the system that we knew worked, which is form-based coding, and that that should be the system for the next chapter in Chicago’s development.
Thanks.
Q & A:
Philip Bess:
I live in Chicago. Very interesting presentation. I want to say, first of all, that Chicago is better than nonChicagoans know, but it’s not nearly as good as Chicagoans like to say it is. And so I want to second your observation that about 95 percent of what makes Chicago livable today was set in motion before 1930. This includes the lakefront, the big parks, the public transportation, the half-mile grid network, the neighborhood streets, the multi-family housing. All of that makes Chicago a kind of laboratory or textbook case of good examples for American urbanism, but you’d never know it from the way at least the architectural community portrays Chicago to the rest of the world.
And I guess I would almost argue that no city has been more damaged by the kind of self-congratulatory, modernist architectural ideology, than the city of Chicago. So, very interesting presentation. The last thing I’d say is that of all the kinds of quixotic endeavors that new urbanists undertake—many of which succeed—I can’t think of any more quixotic effort than attempting to reform the Chicago zoning ordinance.
Katz:
Philip, Howard Decker told us we had to come talk to you before putting this presentation together, and we didn’t get to you, but I hope this passes muster with you. We’d love to privately get some of your thoughts on how to goose it a little further.
Bess:
Let’s talk.
Katz:
Anybody else? Peter?
Peter Kindel:
I agree it was a fantastic presentation. I wonder what you guys’ experience is or was with the Department of Transportation—which controls all the streets in Chicago—vs. the Department of Planning and Development.
Katz:
We have the wonderful opportunity to be critics to the Chicago process. Whereas the folks who are trying to “rewrite the zoning” are deep in the trenches and every little victory they get is huge—they look at something like this; privately, they’ve told us they’d love to do [something like this], but just no way could they see turning things around politically. So they’ll probably be a huge obstacle.
You know, as an act of mercy, since we all need our lunches, this discussion is going to go on and this is really just meant as a general introduction. Why don’t we all get lunch; if anyone has a burning question, come talk to us privately, but Geoff and I need to eat, too.
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