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62
1 mile secondar
y area
1/2 mile
T. O. D. PATTERN
Figure 3.5
Transit-oriented Development diagram.
Developed originally as the ‘Pedestrian Pocket’ by
Peter Calthorpe in the late 1980s, the concept of
TOD has become widespread across the USA. This
diagram, along with Figures 3.2 and 3.3 are taken
from 
The Lexicon of The New Urbanism
by Duany
Plater-Zyberk and Company.
(Diagram courtesy of
Duany Plater-Zyberk and Company)
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gave tangible form to Howard’s Garden City ideals in
the English new town of Letchworth (1904) and
Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London (1907).
Unwin’s book, 
Town Planning in Practice
(1909)
spread his planning and urban design ideas through
Europe and America early last century, and the vol-
ume’s recent republication in America (1994) has
revived the relevance of the work to postmodern
urban designers.
We have also clarified how Unwin himself was
increasingly influenced by the work of the Austrian
teacher and designer Camillo Sitte, whose book 
City
Planning according to Artistic Principles
(1889) set out
principles regarding the artful composition of public
space. Werner Hegemann and Elbert Peets (1922)
summarized Sitte’s findings for American professionals
in the 1920s with the publication of their 
The
American Vitruvius
, and the book’s republication in
1990 brought Sitte’s work before a whole new gener-
ation of American urban designers. Hegemann and
Peets also provided examples of European Garden
Cities as well as codifying Beaux Arts concepts for
American use. In addition, they illustrated America’s
own traditions of the City Beautiful movement, and
their revived handbook became a seminal text for
New Urbanist design in the 1990s.
In Europe there were other parallel movements in
urban design that predated New Urbanism by several
decades in some instances, but without notable
influence at the time of the American movement’s
inception. This can largely be explained by the fact
that despite their common emphasis on the street
and the pedestrian, these parallel movements were
picturesque and empiricist in inspiration as opposed
to the rationalist approach to urbanism espoused by
Krier. We explore this duality further in Chapter 4,
but briefly we mean that the picturesque approach is
based on understanding the city through human
sensory experience (primarily visual), and this reliance
on personal experience is a hallmark of empiricist
philosophy. By contrast, Krier’s approach uses
typologies, or pre-existing patterns of urban form
and space as the basic 
a priori
building blocks of
urbanism. This 
a priori
deductive reasoning, which
in design puts a higher priority on essential and
unchanging consistencies of urbanism rather than
the vagaries of visual experience, is deeply embedded
in the rationalist strand of western philosophical
thought.
In Britain, the previously mentioned work of
Gordon Cullen provided a paramount example of the
picturesque approach, and we have described how his
book 
Townscape
(1961) became a seminal work about
pedestrian-scaled urban environments based on tra-
ditional elements of streets and squares. From the
1970s onward, this approach to urbanism gave rise to
neotraditional developments in Britain under the
rubric ‘neo-vernacular design,’ or ‘pseudo-vernacular’
to its critics. This trend was formalized with the pub-
lication of the official County of Essex 
Design Guide
for Residential Areas
(1973), a visual code book that
established the principles of good (i.e. traditional)
urban design which new developments were expected
to follow. The Introduction complains that few peo-
ple in the County of Essex were happy with the
‘dreary suburban uniformity’ of postwar housing.
New buildings lacked any defining characteristics
that made them specific to the region, and the regula-
tions were intended to spur a ‘more varied and imag-
inative approach’ to design (County Council of
Essex, 5). Using regulations to promote innovation
might seem a counter-intuitive process, but the point
of the Essex publication and others like it was to pro-
mote tighter, more pedestrian-friendly layouts of a
type that were not achievable by means of developers’
standard suburban designs. The new layout princi-
ples demanded design thinking of a higher standard,
but at the same time, their basis of traditional forms
made them easily understandable to professionals
and lay people alike (see Figure 3.6).
In Spain, this neotraditional direction was presaged
in 1929 by the idiosyncratic picturesque development
of the 
Pueblo Español
, or ‘Spanish Village’ as part
of that year’s international exhibition in Barcelona.
Only a few hundred yards from Mies van der Rohe’s
modernist icon, the Barcelona Pavilion, the architec-
tural team of Reventós, Folguera, Nogues and Utrillo
created a brilliant encapsulation of traditional
Spanish townscape. Organized as a warren of small
streets linking three plazas, the urban composition
faithfully recreated examples of Spanish vernacular
buildings, and disposed them in ways that created a
myriad of beautiful urban vignettes. A popular
tourist destination ever since its creation, it was
markedly out of step with the avant-garde architec-
tural and urban doctrines of the times, and this mas-
terwork has remained largely unknown and
unappreciated by architects and planners for decades
(see Figure 3.7).
Similar picturesque approaches to urban com-
position were also evident in France, exemplified
by the ‘Provincial Urbanism’ of Jacques Riboud at
La Verrière-Maurepas in St. Quentin-en-Yvelines out-
side Paris (1966). Seven years later, in southern
CHAPTER THREE
●
TRADITIONAL URBANISM
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France, Françoise Spoerry expanded on this use of tra-
ditional and picturesque urban forms in his resort
development at Port Grimaud (1973) and later hill-
town developments at nearby Gassin.
Most recently, during the late 1980s and 1990s, in
tandem to New Urbanism, a new interest in ‘urban
villages’ has developed. In Britain, under the impetus
of HRH Prince Charles, and his planning advisor, the
ever-present Leon Krier, this work focuses on the cre-
ation of sustainable mixed-use urban developments as
the incremental building blocks of urban expansion
and redevelopment. The intent is to facilitate high
quality but affordable urban living while preserving
the economic and environmental resources of the
countryside. One tangible result of this initiative has
been the new village of Poundbury, outside
Dorchester designed by Leon Krier in 1988, and the
first phase of which was completed in 1997 (see
Figure 3.8). In its idiosyncrasies and royal patronage,
Poundbury has limited use as a precedent for every-
day urbanism just as Seaside’s unexpected success as a
playground for the very affluent has curtailed its
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
64
Parking
Garage
P
KEY
4.151 d
Sketch of mews court (see Fig.4.151c)
G
Front door
Main prospect
2 m wall
Minimum highway area required
in court
Private zone
Public zone
Adopted highway in public zone