Design First Walters fm qxd 2/26/04 7: 50 pm page I

Figure 3.2
Clarence Perry’s
Neighborhood Unit, 1927. The
circle illustrates a five-minute
(approximately 1/4 mile) walk
from the center. (
Diagram [2002
version] courtesy of Duany 
Plater-Zyberk and Company
)
Walters_03.qxd 2/26/04 7:15 PM Page 57

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DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
58
development codes as the means of making sure devel-
opments are controlled by concepts of good urban
design in three dimensions, rather than by the conven-
tional means of two-dimensional diagrams of land use
and dense tomes of legal language. The role of design-
based codes is central to this book: they are exempli-
fied in several of our case studies, and discussed in
detail in Chapters 5 and 10, so here we will simply
highlight their importance. In Seaside and subsequent
projects, Duany and Plater-Zyberk established the
practice of encoding all the salient features of building
forms, types of urban space (streets, squares, parks and
so on) into a simple-to-read sheet of diagrams that cre-
ated the physical vocabulary for building the commu-
nity. Into these three-dimensional templates were then
inserted conditions pertaining to building use. This is
exactly the opposite of conventional planning practice,
where use of buildings or land is paramount and issues
of physical design are usually relegated to detailed legal
language that tries, inadequately, to describe details for
the arrangements of buildings and spaces. Learning
from Duany and Plater-Zyberk’s breakthrough in the
early 1980s, the authors developed their first graphic,
design-based code for the town of Davidson, NC, in
1995 (Keane and Walters, 1995) (see Figure 3.4). This
example was indicative of work by several architect-
planners in communities across North America during
the mid-1990s, searching to find ways of translating
Duany and Plater-Zyberk’s code for a privately con-
trolled development like Seaside into a document that
operated for all circumstances in the fully public realm
of city zoning (City of Toronto, 1995; Hammond and
Walters, 1996).
This issue of coding remains a crucial one because
most aspects of this traditionally based urbanism
are still illegal under many conventional American
zoning ordinances that control development in
American towns and cities (Langdon, 2003a). These
outdated ordinances, developed in the decades after
World War II, provide the framework of detailed regu-
lations that have implemented the modernist and sub-
urbanized view of the city, categorized by low-density
single-use developments separated out across the land-
scape. As we discuss in detail in Chapter 5, the solution
adopted by New Urbanist designers has been to rewrite
development codes based on models of traditional
urbanism, and to persuade municipalities to imple-
ment these as parallel or substitute zoning regulations.
If a renewed appreciation of traditional American
urbanism and a breakthrough in development coding
were the main highlights of Traditional Neighborhood
Development, the equivalent emphasis of Transit-
oriented Development was made clear in its title: 
it renewed the severed connection between urban 
form and public transportation. Transit-oriented
Development embodied many similar and compli-
mentary ideas as its Traditional Neighborhood
Development companion concerning traditional
urban patterns, but it evolved specifically from the
concept of the ‘Pedestrian Pocket.’ This was essentially
TRADITIONAL NEIGHBORHOOD DEVELOPMENT 1997
School to be shared by 
adjacent neighborhood
Short face of 
residential blocks
Club
Playgroud in each quadrant
Roads connect acroos 
edges wherever possible
Bus stops at center
Mixed-use streets anchored 
by retail at 100% corners
Parking lot designed as plaza
Workshops and offices 
along edges
Regional institutions 
at the edge
Neighborhood shops and 
institutions at center