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Urban
Design as Public Policy
(1974) which argued a powerful
(and prescient) case for urban design criteria being
embedded within zoning controls. Typical of these
new zoning codes, and others during the 1980s and
1990s that followed this precedent, have been a prolif-
eration of urban design guidelines attached to, or
parallel with zoning categories. Such guidelines spell
out criteria for developers and their architects to fol-
low in developing their designs, and include: street
width and building height; volumetric massing; per-
centages and arrangements of glazed areas in building
façades; entrances and storefronts at sidewalk level;
and landscaping provisions to streets and sidewalks.
We have mentioned the contributions to urban
design by the English urban designer Gordon Cullen
on several occasions in the text, but he deserves yet
another mention here as the author of one of the
most innovative attempts to code the urban environ-
ment. Under the title 
Notation
, Cullen developed the
‘HAMS Code’ (Humanity, Artifacts, Mood and
Space) in the 1960s. He used a system of symbols
and numeric values both to record the content and
quality of an existing urban setting, and then to
orchestrate future development by means of a nota-
tional system that he likened to a musical score
(Cullen, 1967). In this analogy, the urban designer
became the conductor, and individual architects for
individual projects played the role of musicians, inter-
preting their parts of the melody within the overall
arrangement. This approach has overtones of Camillo
Sitte’s view, expressed in his book 
City Planning
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According to Artistic Principles
, that architects ‘should
compose the city like a Beethoven symphony.’
Though unsuccessful in terms of wide acceptance,
Cullen’s method of coding towns and cities informed
his own influential work on the reinterpretation of
traditional urban forms and spaces and boosted the
rise of neotraditional planning practices during the
following decades. The influential design code man-
ual, 
A Design Guide for Residential Areas
, prepared for
the County Council of Essex in England by Melvin
Dunbar and others in 1973, is a direct descendant of
Cullen’s work and was a model for many similar
ordinances in the UK.
While the design ordinances for the centers of
American cities were being revised in the 1980s to
incorporate traditional concepts of defined urban
spaces, urban designers began to examine suburban
environments from similar viewpoints, seeking to ame-
liorate the bland appearance and environmental degra-
dation of suburban areas. But one of the main obstacles
faced by New Urbanist architects and planners to the
implementation of their ideas was, as we’ve pointed out
previously, the fact that most aspects of this tradition-
ally based urbanism were illegal under many American
zoning ordinances developed after World War II. The
solution of these designers has been to follow the
memorable rhetoric of Andres Duany (with his Cuban
American background) to ‘capture the transmitters’,
that is, to rewrite the development ordinances that
control the form of urban and suburban development.
These new codes are based intentionally on models
of traditional urban design. Simplified graphic
diagrams and dimensions deal explicitly with the
scale, massing and placement of buildings to frame
space, the organization of parking, and the design of
streets, parks and squares. As we have noted earlier,
this coding of development in easy-to-understand
pictorial formats was first developed by Duany and
Plater-Zyberk, in their design for the new town of
Seaside (1981), and the ‘Seaside Code’ has provided a
model for similar design-based ordinances across the
USA. In privately controlled developments like
Seaside, or Celebration, the new town near Orlando
in Florida financed by the Disney Corporation
(1995), these private codes can specify great detail in
terms of architectural style, materials, and construc-
tion. But in normal urban and suburban contexts,
where development is controlled by publicly admin-
istered zoning, state laws usually restrict the ability of
municipalities to dictate this level of detail. Conse-
quently, during the 1990s much work by architects
and progressive planners focused on marrying the
concepts and practices of the New Urbanist design
codes with the full complexity of public zoning ordi-
nances for towns and cities.
This led initially to the development of ‘parallel
codes’, where a set of design-based New Urbanist
ordinances was established as the preferred option for
development, but which left the old sprawl-producing
regulations in place as a matter of political expediency.
More radically, some communities moved to create
new, replacement zoning ordinances based on New
Urbanist design principles. The authors have been
instrumental in developing both types of codes for
communities in North Carolina. In 1994–95, we
worked with the town of Davidson, North Carolina,
to create a parallel code, with the intention that
this would be expanded to be a full replacement
ordinance after five years. In 2002 the town made that
change. Meanwhile, the authors had assisted the adja-
cent towns of Cornelius and Huntersville to enact full
replacement New Urbanist zoning ordinances in
1995 and 1996. All together these three compatible
sets of regulations controlled development across an
area of approximately 100 square miles. Some of this
work is highlighted in Chapter 11.
Such ordinances mark a fundamental change from
conventional zoning that has been based on building
use as the main criterion for organizing urban devel-
opment. Instead, these design-based codes operate on
the principle that buildings and spaces outlast their
original uses, and that regulations should be based on
good design criteria rather than transient activities.
Accordingly, the creators of such new regulations ana-
lyze examples of successful urbanism, either from his-
tory or from detailed design studies, and then encode
these models into three-dimensional envelopes of
building types, urban forms and public spaces that
become the vocabulary for building towns and cities.
The primary points of reference in these codes are
typological. They are constructed around established
building types, such as storefront, workplace, apart-
ment, attached house, detached house, civic building
and so forth, and spatial types such as streets, parks,
plazas and squares. Each building type is defined in
three dimensions with sets of governing measure-
ments and stipulations regarding scale, character and
use of materials. Each zoning district is first and
foremost comprised of a permitted range of building
types, setting out the potential variations for that part
of the community in three-dimensional form and
layout. In parallel with these building types, a range
CHAPTER FIVE
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GROWTH MANAGEMENT, DEVELOPMENT CONTROL AND URBAN DESIGN
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of uses is then allowed within each typology, with the
emphasis on mixing compatible activities rather than
separating them.
Similar design-based classification systems are
developed for the different types of streets (residen-
tial streets, commercial streets and special types like
boulevards), and for public open spaces like play-
grounds, parks and urban squares. The regulations
also stress the requirements that streets and public
spaces are defined by the fronts of buildings (service
alleys are the only exception), and that they connect
into an efficient network that is attractive, safe and
convenient for pedestrians and cyclists as well as
motorists. Cul-de-sacs are generally not permitted
except for particular site circumstances. As we have
noted previously, too many cul-de-sacs break up the
connectivity of the street system and create an ineffi-
cient street layout that minimizes the choice of route
and concentrates all traffic onto only a few roads. To
make sure that the connected streets provide safe
environments for pedestrians, street designs in resi-
dential areas focus on narrow, slow speed streets with
wide sidewalks and on-street parking to protect
pedestrians from moving vehicles (see Figure 5.8).
One important element of these design-based
ordinances is their provision of incentives for devel-
opers and landowners. These incentives assist in the
transition from conventional patterns of thinking
that are based on the use of land and structures, to
new ones that are founded on the design of buildings
and public spaces. Such inducements usually take the
form of density bonuses awarded by the regulations
for either following the unfamiliar form of the regu-
lations (if the ordinance is a parallel code in competi-
tion with conventional regulations), or for exceeding
the minimum code requirements. For example, a fea-
ture of many ordinances written to deal with green-
field development concerns the protection of open
space and the preservation of existing landscapes for
visual or environmental reasons. Several codes of this
type that we have written stipulate a minimum per-
centage of the site to be preserved as open space, but
if the developer exceeds this amount he or she is
awarded the right to build more dwellings on the
remaining land. These bonuses are awarded on a slid-
ing scale relative to the amount of land preserved
over and above the minimum requirement. This
typically results in clusters of compact development
amid areas of preserved landscape.
These or similar incentives are needed to overcome
Americans’ cultural resistance to government
regulation, and in particular to the perception by
developers and property owners that these design-
based codes are more onerous than the ones they are
typically used to. We would argue that these new
codes aren’t more onerous in principle; rather it’s the
fact they’re different that causes an initial negative
reaction. The old suburban sprawl formulas that
developers and their designers had memorized have
to be unlearned and a new design ethos absorbed in
its place. For this reason we strongly advocate incor-
porating as many incentives into the new zoning
codes as possible. This provides the developer with a
motive to meet the spirit as well as the letter of the
new regulations. It is also a useful public relations
tool for architects and planners to point out that
good design provides opportunities to produce devel-
opments that are more profitable than those churned
out by the old standard formulas.
The typological basis of these codes is important.
We mentioned in Chapter 4 that typology was a
mechanism for both analyzing the city and for
producing new designs, and to these attributes we
can now add a third role – controlling development.
This applies to zoning ordinances, and to the last
topic we want to touch on in this chapter, urban
design guidelines.
When we prepare design guidelines, whether they
are called ‘urban design guidelines’ or ‘general
development guidelines’, our purpose is, frankly, to
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES