shamefully racist. The Myers Park regulations, for
example, stipulated that no African-American could
live or own property in the neighborhood. While
such egregious examples of discrimination are long
gone, zoning codes can and do still institutionalize
racism by means of requiring large minimum size
house lots in a residential subdivision, thus ensuring
that only wealthy individuals can afford to live there.
Given the fact that America in 2003 is still largely
divided into more prosperous white and poorer black
and Hispanic ethnic groupings, the stipulation of
large lot sizes is very often synchronous with the
exclusion of blacks and Hispanics.
On the positive side, the generalist scope
and intent of Olmsted’s and Nolen’s codes enabled
the regulations to deal with the overall environment,
and to specify design elements that contributed to
the character of the public space. This holistic
design intent was in contrast to the regulations
developed in England during the same period of the
late nineteenth century, which were technical codes
to improve the overcrowded and unsanitary urban
environment of that nation’s industrial cities. The
Public Health Act of 1875 and subsequent legislation
created standard building regulations that improved
the standard of working-class housing design but
which were applied literally by speculative builders
without any correlation to a cohesive master plan.
This resulted in what became the typical environ-
ment of working-class areas in British cities – a
collection of monotonous straight streets constructed
with no higher ambitions of civic design. There were
no parks and few trees; these were regarded as unnec-
essary embellishments that reduced the developer’s
profits (see Figure 5.7).
This type of English regulation for urban develop-
ment, based on generic formulas rather than design
concepts or a specific master plan, was regrettably fol-
lowed in America in the 1930s, when the Federal
Housing Administration (FHA) created technical
standards for subdivisions as requirements for federal
insurance and mortgages (Dutton: p. 72). As we have
seen in Chapter 3, it was these regulations that
increased the widths of streets, enlarged the sizes of
blocks by minimizing cross streets, and encouraged
cul-de-sacs. Since the 1930s the holistic design intent
of the earlier American codes for projects like
Riverside and Myers Park was smothered by a
plethora of specific requirements from an increasing
range of professional specialists, each concerned with
their own rules and not worrying about their place in
any larger picture. For example, regulations that now
govern much subdivision design include separate
requirements from planners, transportation engi-
neers, fire departments, utility providers of gas, water
and electricity and public works departments for
storm water and sewers, and lending institutions.
This fragmentary nature of different sets of codes is
one of the biggest hurdles New Urbanist architects
and planners face in establishing new sets of regula-
tions that return the focus of development control to
design standards that embody an overall design
vision.
Public discussion about sprawl and the chaotic
environment that characterizes much of suburban
America often refers to the mess as an ‘unplanned’
environment. This is simply not true. There is more
planning going on than ever before. Every decision
about the placement of buildings, driveways, signs,
roadways and utilities is the result of conformity to
one or more sets of planning, or more correctly, zon-
ing standards. What is missing is any sense of design.
Contemporary suburbia is planned to death, and
more ‘planning’ won’t improve it. The only way to
rectify the situation is to return to concepts of urban
design, thinking in terms of three-dimensional
relationships between buildings and spaces rather
CHAPTER FIVE
●
GROWTH MANAGEMENT, DEVELOPMENT CONTROL AND URBAN DESIGN
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