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Figure 4.19
Camden Road, SouthEnd, Charlotte,
NC, Namour Wright, Architects, 1998. Useful new
urban infill development is often masked in America
by a fake historicism that glorifies the past at the
expense of the present. To fit in with public taste,
many developers desire their buildings to look old
the moment they are completed.
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III
Practice
PA R T
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SYNOPSIS
This chapter examines some of the similarities and
differences between the planning systems in Britain
and America. Most of the similarities occur in the
professional realm, where architects, urban designers,
and planners in both countries do similar tasks
using similar concepts. The differences are in the
political and cultural spheres, where a deep divide
exists between American attitudes toward the san-
ctity of private property rights and the British (and
European) propensity toward the communal good. We
highlight some of these variations in detail to explain
the different cultural contexts in which professionals
have to work.
We then discuss two fundamental differences
between the American and British systems: first, the
American distinction between planning – establish-
ing the future vision – and zoning – the legal means
of regulating growth; and second, the fact that in
America, plans are advisory and have no force in law
other than to fulfil the requirement to have a plan. In
Britain, by contrast, while local plans are not legally
binding documents that specify precise dimensions
and design parameters as they do in parts of main-
land Europe, local governments, after a period of lax-
ity during the 1980s, are once more obliged to make
decisions about applications to develop land strictly
in accordance with their adopted plans. Planning and
development control is a unified process in which
design regulation is increasingly a part.
In the final section we examine the relationship of
urban design principles to the regulation of the built
environment, through a brief historical discussion of
design-based ordinances, particularly as they have
related to American practice. We note the typological
basis that underlies most design-based coding, and
defend the use of urban design guidelines in contem-
porary practice.