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particular reason: the participants were not allowed
to create their normal planners’ bubble diagrams of
uses linked with arrows. Instead they had to think in
terms of specific building footprints and the sizes and
character of public spaces. The planners were operat-
ing at or beyond the limit of their professional com-
petence, for designing doesn’t come easy to a
profession that hasn’t been taught concepts of form
and space for several decades.
Despite the rules of the workshop, the planners
started out by doing what they’d been trained to do:
they ‘planned’ by diagraming different uses in
abstract zones on a site plan without reference to
building form or spatial dimension. Many of the
ideas were appropriate, but the colored diagrams only
scratched the surface of the given problems.
Challenged to move beyond abstraction, planners
eventually found they knew more than they gave
themselves credit for. For example, they knew that a
good depth for an apartment building was 40–50
feet. Sixty to 80 feet deep was appropriate for retail,
while offices in America generally require floorplates
from 90–120 feet deep. (Unlike Europe, internal,
windowless offices are normal in the USA.) When
the teams drew the actual dimensions and shapes of
buildings, and located them specifically on the site,
whole new levels of consideration opened up. Where
was the front of the building? Where was the back?
How were these two conditions different? Where
might the front entrances be located? Where was the
service and loading bay? What degree of enclosure
was appropriate for public space? Where did public
space begin and end? Where were the thresholds
between public space and private space? And how
could these transitions be handled? These issues sim-
ply don’t appear at the level of colored diagrams of
uses. But they are vital factors in the creation of any
successful urban place.
The planners in the workshop relished this new
scope and level of detail. They didn’t need to draw
beautifully; they just needed to commit to a layout of
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buildings and spaces and draw the plan with some
degree of accurate scale. Then they could evaluate
their outline solution, and improve it with a second,
and a third drawing.
One issue stood out above all others – the relation-
ship between the fronts and backs of buildings. It is a
general rule of urban design (to be broken 
very
rarely,
if ever) that building fronts should face building
fronts and backs should face backs. In this way, terri-
tory and patterns of activity can be identified and
public spaces defined and distinguished from private.
In a simple example of a typical street of houses,
‘public’ front gardens face each other across the side-
walks and roadway, while ‘private’ backyards are adja-
cent to similar spaces at the rear of homes. As
individuals and families, we have different patterns of
socially accepted behavior for each zone. It is easy to
imagine the spatial and social confusion if someone’s
front garden and front door faced a private backyard.
The cohesion of the public realm would have been
breached by the intrusion of private space, and pri-
vate areas compromised by excessive visibility. This
simple principle applies to all scales of urban devel-
opment … or it should.
However, this was new information to many plan-
ners used to working in more or less exclusively sub-
urban situations. In the suburbs the looser spatial
pattern of buildings allows dysfunctional back-to-
front relationships to be masked by distance or land-
scape screening with no consideration given to the
design and integrity of the public realm – the spaces
between buildings – especially from the point of view
of the pedestrian. Structures are sited very carelessly
in suburbia because the quality of the public realm is
rarely an issue. The only ‘public’ spaces we walk
across are asphalt parking lots. The concept of public
space as an ‘outdoor room’ for shared community
activities has been forgotten.
Outdoor rooms, be they long skinny ones like
streets, more rectangular versions like squares and
plazas, or irregular and green like neighborhood
parks, all have one thing in common: a greater or
lesser degree of spatial enclosure. Spatial enclosure is
a function of the proportions of the space – the
height of the buildings relative to the width of the
space. From experience and the study of precedent,
good height-to-width ratios for spaces that feel com-
fortable for a variety of human activities range from
the tightness of 1:1 or 2:1 for pedestrian activities
(a more extreme ratio of 3:1 can be pleasantly dra-
matic) to a more relaxed standard of 1:3 and up to a
maximum of 1:6 for spaces that include cars, either
moving or parked (see Figures 4.4–4.5). Beyond the
height-to-width ratio of 1:6, all sense of enclosure is
lost; the width of the space is too great and the build-
ing height too low (see Figure 4.6).
The condition of enclosure generated by the
height-to-width ratio of the space is related simply to
the physiology of the human eye. If the width of a
public space is such that the pedestrian’s cone of
vision encompasses more sky than building façades,
then the feeling of enclosure is slight. In the reverse
condition, where the building façades predominate,
the feeling of enclosure is heightened.
The other important notion never to forget is that
these major public rooms must be enclosed by the
fronts
of buildings, not the backs, and rarely the sides.
The front façades of buildings are their public faces,
and as such they must front onto public space,
whether it’s a street, square or a neighborood park as
illustrated in Figure 4.7.
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES