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Penn Central Transportation Company v. City of
New York
) property rights advocates and developers
hold the threat of aggressive legal action over many
timid municipalities.
Helping to resolve issues like alternative develop-
ment scenarios for land is one of the advantages of
our method of designing in full view of the public,
using intensive design ‘charrettes’ or participatory
workshops. In these venues, concepts like the hous-
ing clusters that can potentially benefit the commu-
nity through less polluted run-off into streams can be
illustrated clearly. A perspective drawing of dwellings
carefully integrated into a protected landscape is
worth a dozen abstract planning diagrams of the
same concept. Citizens understand the issues more
easily and are likely to support the proposed design
solutions, and opponents may even be persuaded that
the ideas have merit.
This hypothetical example illustrates the theme of
the book – how communities can radically improve
both their process of town planning and their finished
product of town building by using three-dimensional
urban design techniques. When we work in communi-
ties large or small, we usually focus on the public spaces
– streets, squares, parks, and so forth – and design them
in considerable detail, because these spaces are the core
of any community, the real armature of public life. This
process often includes designing the architectural ele-
ments of the buildings that define and enclose these
public spaces – the façades, entrances, and massing that
contribute to the general appearance seen from eye
level. We integrate the specifics of a building’s use into
this design process, but use is not always a determining
factor because it often changes, sometimes several times
within a building’s lifespan. It is more important to get
the relationships between building-to-building and
building-to-public space correct. These are – or should
be – long-term issues.
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INTRODUCTION
3
During community workshops, we also work with
transportation planners to design traffic circulation
and parking arrangements, and to integrate trans-
portation into public spaces. It’s these public spaces,
defined by buildings and landscape, that form the
framework of the master plan for the community, and
the development economist on our team ensures our
solutions are economically viable. We then encode
our three-dimensional design solutions in simplified
and graphically rich regulations for implementation
and development control so that over time the com-
munity will build itself in accordance with the master
plan. Our case study examples illustrate variations of
this method used on sites as small as an urban block
and as large as a region of 60 square miles, and in the
very last chapter we draw these threads together in a
way that links the smallest scale of the block to the
largest frame of the region.
Our case studies focus on American communities
seeking to implement Smart Growth strategies by
means of environmentally sensitive suburban expan-
sion and infill, and the redevelopment of older urban
areas. This emphasis goes hand-in-hand with the
resurgence of traditional concepts of city design in
America under the rubric of New Urbanism. We are
sympathetic to the ideals and ambitions of New
Urbanism (one of the authors is a signatory of the
founding Charter), and we discuss this movement in
some detail in Chapter 3. We are especially keen to
dispel some of the myths and misconceptions sur-
rounding New Urbanist concepts, and to demon-
strate their connections to many similar ideas from
the past 200 years on both sides of the Atlantic.
Although our work is developed from a New
Urbanist agenda, this book is not a review of the
greatest hits of New Urbanism, something achieved
well by Katz (1994) and Dutton (2000). Our case
studies are analysed from 
inside
the urban planning
process. They are projects in which the authors have
played lead roles, usually in association with the
North Carolina office of The Lawrence Group, a firm
of architect-planners based in St. Louis, Missouri. We
have specifically organized our case studies to illus-
trate the full variety of urban scales, from the region,
to the city, the town, the neighbourhood, and down
to the scale of an individual urban block, and in
so doing we exemplify a key theme of the Charter of
the New Urbanism: the town planning and urban
design principles inherent in New Urbanism are rele-
vant and applicable at all scales and in all situations.
It is a comprehensive way of looking at patterns of
human settlement.
Our examples are works in progress, for city build-
ing is a continuous activity; it is never finished. Some
case studies have achieved very successful results;
others have hit snags during implementation. But all
of them provide valuable lessons in their content and
their narrative.
We stated earlier that our audience for the book
wanted plans for action, not academic analysis. But
no proposals for the planning and design of commu-
nities should be used out of their historical and theo-
retical context. As academics as well as practitioners,
we love the histories and theories of design and plan-
ning, partly for their own sake as fascinating knowl-
edge, but also because they help us design and plan
well. Without a grounding in history and theory, all
design becomes contingent on fleeting circumstances –
be they financial, personal, political, or locational. As
practitioners, we know just how powerful these con-
tingent forces can be, sometimes positively, often
negatively. We therefore use theory and history as the
firm structure and platform for our work, and we
have traced the interconnections between urban ideas
with some care. We explain how contemporary plan-
ners and architects like ourselves have arrived at our
present set of beliefs, and why we adhere so strongly
to them.
But this isn’t an exhaustive history of the Anglo-
American city. That’s not our purpose. Rather, we
discuss key historical and theoretical concepts of con-
temporary planning and urban design, often high-
lighted by the authors’ personal experiences and
anecdotes, to illustrate a practical approach that is con-
sciously