The Visible Hand

"To Seward Mott, who headed FHA's Land Planning Division, the legislation's mandate provided an opportunity to redirect the design of suburban America and to create conditions that would force public officials and planners alike to adopt planning measures and to abandon the rectilinear grid in favor of plans of curvilinear streets. Curvilinear plans had many advantages when compared to rectilinear gridiron plans: they provided greater privacy and visual interest; could be adapted to greater variations in topography; reduced the cost of utilities and road construction; and, by eliminating the need for dangerous four-way intersections, provided a safer environment for domestic activities.(93)

The curvilinear layouts recommended by FHA in the 1930s set the standards for the design of post-World War II subdivisions."

"The FHA set forth seven minimum requirements for new subdivisions:

1. Location exhibiting a healthy and active demand for homes.

2. Location possessing a suitable site in terms of topography, soil condition, tree cover, and absence of hazards such as flood, fog, smoke, obnoxious odors, etc.

3. Accessibility by means of public transportation (streetcars and buses) and adequate highways to schools, employment, and shopping centers.

4. Installation of appropriate utilities and street improvements (meeting city or county specifications), and carefully related to needs of the development.

5. Compliance with city, county or regional plans and regulations, particularly local zoning and subdivision regulations to ensure that the neighborhood will become stable (and real estate values as well.)

6. Protection of values through "appropriate" deed restrictions (including setbacks, lot sizes, minimum costs of construction).

7. Guarantee of a sound financial set up, whereby subdividers were financially able to carry through their sales and development program, and where taxes and assessments were in line with the type of development contemplated and likely to remain stable.

In addition, FHA issued a set of "desirable standards," which, although not strict requirements, were additional factors that influenced the approval of a project.

• Careful adaptation of subdivision layout to topography and to natural features

• Adjustment of street plan and street widths and grades to best meet the traffic needs

• Elimination of sharp corners and dangerous intersections

• Long blocks that eliminated unnecessary streets

•Carefully studied lot plan with generous and well-shaped house sites

• Parks and playgrounds

• Establishment of community organizations of property owners

• Incorporation of features that add to the privacy and attractiveness of the community."- U.S. Dept. Of Interior

The Shaping of Suburbia

"The FHA was authorized to provide Federal insurance for privately-financed mortgages for homes, housing subdivisions, and rental housing. Through the development of standards, as well as its review and approval of properties for mortgage insurance, the FHA institutionalized principles for both neighborhood planning and small house design.

FHA's Land Planning Division under Seward H. Mott, an experienced site planner, was responsible for establishing principles for neighborhood planning and for reviewing subdivision plans submitted by developers seeking FHA approval. This approval would not only enable developers to secure private financing but would also make low-cost mortgages available for prospective home owners. Mott's staff translated many of the prevailing ideas about neighborhood design that had been endorsed by the 1931 President's Conference, including Perry's Neighborhood Unit Formula, into written standards and basic design principles that could be uniformly applied across the Nation to the design of neighborhoods of small houses."- U.S. Dept. of Interior

The Federal Housing Administration

"The 1931 President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership led to substantial reforms in housing for middle and lower middle income Americans, and resulted in the passage of the National Housing Act of 1934, creating the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). These reforms were guided by in the “Neighborhood Unit” concept (introduced by Clarence Perry of the Russell Sage Foundation), a revival of Riverside, Illinois as an ideal of American suburban design, and the synthesis of Olmstedian (curvilinear) and Garden City principles (hierarchy of roads, superblock, restrictions, etc.)

Long curvilinear blocks avoided four-way intersections in favor of cul-de-sacs,and circles. Designers grouped modest houses of similar style and scale and set them back a uniform distance from tree-lined streets, with nearby access to trolley or bus lines. Garden Apartment communities featured multiple buildings of similar style and scale arranged within a garden-like superblock. Similar to the Country Club districts, deed restrictions and protective covenants prohibited “non-conforming” uses and resulted in a cohesive, even homogenous, residential village in a park-like setting."- Cultural Landscape Foundation

The Codes Project

"This website is an anthology of the codes, laws and related documents that have created, or sought to create, particular urban forms. It is a searchable archive drawn from a broad array of historical documents. We have selected documents from around the world, and from all time periods."

The Fused Grid & Other Ways Forward

"...the Fused Grid anticipates and channels land intensification and mixed-uses by creating a zone between residential districts that is flexible in possible land uses - which can include schools, parks and commercial. This zone can also accommodate adaptations to future traffic demand by allowing for road redesign and expansion within the existing road allowance.

The Fused Grid is a model for laying out neighbourhoods and districts. It combines the geometries of inner city grids and the cul-de-sac of the conventional suburbs. The objective is to retain the best characteristics of each and none of their disadvantages while raising the quality of the neighbourhood environment."

Rethinking the Street Space: Toolkits and Street Design Manuals

The primary goals of the new street design manuals are often quite similar. Common goals include:

"Livability and Placemaking. Making streets places to linger and places to cherish.

Access and Mobility: Improving the public right-of-way for all users.

Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety: Supporting design improvements such as raised crosswalks, bulbouts, bike lanes, and roundabouts that improve safety for pedestrians and bike riders.

Flexibility: Giving designers choice, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.

Context: Designing streets based on their place within a hierarchy of streets and their relationship to surrounding land uses, densities, and commercial activities.

Balance: Maintaining several functions in the street that include safety, roadway infrastructure, environmental sensitivity, and others.

Healthy Environment: Minimizing negative environmental effects and creating places that encourage walking and exercise.

Visual Excellence: Improving the overall aesthetic with an emphasis on high quality, lasting design and materials.

Common Strategies:

Many of the design strategies included in the manuals are similar from one city to the next. Common strategies used in the manuals include:

Minimization of the roadway to accommodate travel flow, transferring excess vehicle space to the pedestrian.

Preferential facilities for bus and bike riders in the form of bus lanes, bus shelters, bike lanes, paths, racks, and lockers.

Pedestrian amenities for placemaking such as street furniture and human-scale street lighting.

New public spaces with benches, fountains, and vendors. Both San Francisco and New York propose new public plazas in areas previously dedicated to the vehicle as pilot projects.

Pedestrian safety features such as curb extensions or "bulb-outs" at corners or mid-block to widen the sidewalk and make crossing easier, visible crosswalks, raised crosswalks, and raised intersections.

Environmentally-inspired landscaping like permeable paving, bio-swales, stormwater recapture in tree pits and planters, and climate sensitive plant palates."

Why Street Design Matters

The Great Opportunity

"On average, streets, sidewalks, and alleys occupy between 25-30% of our urban land. As the largest chunk of undeveloped space in cities, streets present an incredible opportunity to address a wide range of urban problems. And since they are publicly-owned, cities do not need to negotiate ownership, maintenance, and regulatory control. Our street spaces are the ultimate untapped urban resource, a public land bank that is waiting to be cashed in.

Why is Good Street Design So Hard to Come By?

There are several reasons why good street design is difficult to achieve. First, streets must fulfill a wide variety of functions for diverse groups at different times. Designing streets to satisfy all users is tough. Second, historically street design has been the role of the traffic engineer whose goal it was to move traffic through streets, rather than to attract people to linger in shared public space. Third, as cities look for new street design methods, a wide variety of engaged parties are eager to have a seat at the negotiation table, including bicycle coalitions, stormwater experts, bus rapid transit advocates, business improvement districts, community gardeners, school districts, utility companies, etc. While participation of these groups allows for more holistic design, achieving consensus among disparate parties is challenging. Fourth, the power to regulate the street space is dispersed in ways that makes communication and collaboration difficult to achieve." - Amy Hawks & Georgia Sheridan

Residential Street Pattern Design

"Streets connect the private with the public domain and also link different parts of a neighborhood.These linkages support social interaction and exchange—both vital functions. Street design contributes significantly to the quality and character of a community since appropriately designed streets create safe, quiet and healthy environments, particularly for children.

Current thinking on street pattern design appears to be divided between concern for the efficiencies of infrastructure and traffic, and a consideration for aesthetics.This generally translates into a battle between conventional suburban loops and culs-de-sac, and “traditional” grid models.The latter approach typifies smart growth, new urbanism, and traditional neighborhood development. The goal of this study is to suggest street patterns that balance efficiency and quality, and reconcile functionality and aesthetics. This requires identification of the positive attributes of conventional suburban development while utilizing current technology and satisfying consumer preferences."- Canadian Mortgage & Housing Corporation

Clarence Stein

"Trained as an architect, Stein participated in several of the most influential housing complex designs of the 20th century, including the "garden city" plans for Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, New York; Radburn, New Jersey; Chatham Village in Pittsburgh; and Baldwin Hills Village (known today as Village Green) in Los Angeles.

...In 1921, he and Henry Wright developed a partnership rooted in Ebenezer Howard’s "Garden City" ideals of safe, community-based. With Wright, Lewis Mumford, and other colleagues, Stein founded the Regional Planning Association of America in 1923 envisioning widespread reform of U.S. planning and design practices, focusing on high-density urban housing and the residential subdivision. Their designs were successful in great part because of their emphasis on the landscape. For example, Sunnyside Gardens provided central courtyards where families could gather while the suburban locale of Radburn led to experimentation with peripheral roads and short automobile-friendly culs-de-sac with a variety of housing unit types." -Cultural Landscape Foundation

Smart Code

"The SmartCode is a model transect-based development code available for all scales of planning, from the region to the community to the block and building. The code is intended for local calibration to your town or neighborhood. As a form-based code, the SmartCode keeps towns compact and rural lands open, while reforming the destructive sprawl-producing patterns of separated use zoning.

All About the Code

The basics, quick and easy.

The SmartCode is a unified land development ordinance for planning and urban design. It folds zoning, subdivision regulations, urban design, and optional architectural standards into one compact document.

Because the SmartCode enables community vision by coding specific outcomes that are desired in particular places, it is meant to be locally customized (also known as “calibrated”) by professional planners, architects, and attorneys.

Important: The SmartCode is not a building code. Building codes address life/safety issues such as fire and storm protection. Examples of building codes include the IBC, IRC, and ICC documents.

The SmartCode supports these outcomes: community vision, local character, conservation of open lands, transit options, and walkable and mixed-use neighborhoods. It prevents these outcomes: wasteful sprawl development, automobile-dominated streets, empty downtowns, and a hostile public realm. It allows different approaches in different areas within the community, unlike a one-size-fits-all conventional code. This gives the SmartCode unusual political power, as it permits buy-in from all stakeholders.

The SmartCode is considered a “form-based code” because it strongly addresses the physical form of building and development. Conventional zoning codes are based primarily on use and density. They have caused systemic problems over the past sixty years by separating uses, making mixed-use and walkable neighborhoods essentially illegal.

The SmartCode is also a transect-based code. A “transect” is usually seen as a continuous cross-section of natural habitats for plants and animals, ranging from shorelines to wetlands to uplands. The specific transect that the SmartCode uses is based on the human habitat, ranging from the most rural environments to the most urban environments. This transect is divided into a range of “Transect Zones,” each with its own complex character. It ensures that a community offers a full diversity of building types, thoroughfare types, and civic space types, and that each has appropriate characteristics for its location.

The six T-Zones are: T-1 Natural, T-2 Rural, T-3 Sub-Urban, T-4 General Urban, T-5 Urban Center, and T-6 Urban Core.

The Transect is a powerful tool because its standards can be coordinated across many other disciplines and documents, including ITE (transportation), and LEED (environmental performance). Thus the SmartCode integrates the design protocols of a variety of specialties, including traffic engineering, public works, town planning, architecture, landscape architecture, and ecology.

The SmartCode addresses development patterns at three scales of planning (thus it may replace a number of other documents):

the Sector (Regional) Scale

the Community Scale

the Block and Building Scale

If stronger architectural guidelines are desired, a community may further adopt supplemental regulations or a pattern book."

Duany & Plater-Zyberk (DPZ)

"This book is a study of two different models of urban growth: the traditional neighborhood and suburban sprawl. They are polar opposites in appearance, function, and character: they look different, they act differently, and they affect us in different ways."

"Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, are co-founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), recognized by the New York Times as "the most important collective architectural movement in the United States in the past fifty years." The movement, currently over 3,000 strong, marked a turning point from the segregated planning and architecture of post-war America; instead, they advocated and promoted the universal and time-tested principles of traditional planning and design that created the best-loved and most-enduring places throughout the world.

A significant aspect of DPZ’s work is its innovative planning regulations which accompany each design. Tailored to the individual project, the codes address the manner in which buildings are formed and located to ensure that they create useful and distinctive public spaces. Local architectural traditions and building techniques are also codified within the regulations. In the last five years, DPZ has also been continually developing a new model, form-based zoning code called the SmartCode, which has been adopted by municipalities across the country."

Kenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier

A Summary of Kenneth T. Jacksons'-- Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States

by Cory Scruton

"After World War II mass construction of housing in suburban locations became very common. Due to the dire need of housing, the federal government provided housing programs that started massive housing construction. Following the war high marriage and birth rates lead to families that needed a place to live. These problems lead to the increase of large scale housing production in the United States.

The Levitt family and their already successful construction company, took advantage of the housing boom and started mass construction of houses. Technological advances in tools, materials, and productivity lead to a totally new construction process. This fast paced construction process lead to the largest housing development built by a single builder, at that time, Levittown. Almost every mass construction builder copied the Levitts' new techniques. The Levitts soon had other mass production projects in various areas, with every project learning and improving on the mistakes of the previous. This lead to enhanced mass production living areas, and thus more people moving to these areas. In 1954, nine million people had moved to the suburbs in the previous decade.

Jackson states major characteristics of the postwar suburbs:

Neighborhoods built on the outer edges of the city

Low density of people per square mile

Architectural similarity

Easy availability

Economic and racial homogeneity

Jackson believes that the suburban housing boom may have caused these effects:

Weakened extended family relations

Lead to the decline in the central cities

Provided a common mold lifestyle for the suburban people to follow."

Eran-Ben Joseph & Micheal Southworth

"An oddity of urban research is the paucity of books about streets. City streets occupy more than a quarter of the land in most North American cities, literally shape the city, and set the tone for sections of cities. Despite their omnipresence and influence, they are usually treated only slightly less functionally than sewer pipes. A few writers raise their sights to the aesthetic of streets, or lack thereof, or to the social importance of streets. The enduring quality of Michael Southworth and Eran Ben-Joseph's book is that it brings all of those concerns, and more, to one place. Readers learn how streets declined to merely functional status, and how and why their star is now rising."

-Beth Moore Milroy

Kevin Lynch

Kevin Lynch, born in 1918, was a significant contributor to city planning and city design in the twentieth century.

"One of Lynch's innovations was the concept of place legibility, which is essentially the ease with which people understand the layout of a place. By introducing this idea, Lynch was able to isolate distinct features of a city, and see what specifically is making it so vibrant, and attractive to people. To understand the layout of a city, people first and foremost create a mental map. Mental maps of a city are mental representations of what the city contains, and its layout according to the individual. These mental representations, along with the actual city, contain many unique elements, which are defined by Lynch as a network of paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. First, paths are channels by which people move along in their travels. Examples of paths are roads, trails, and sidewalks. The second element, edges, are all other lines not included in the path group. Examples of edges include walls, and seashores. Next, districts are sections of the city, usually relatively substantial in size, which have an identifying character about them. A wealthy neighborhood such as Beverly Hills is one such example. The fourth element, nodes, are points or strategic spots where there is an extra focus, or added concentration of city features. Prime examples of nodes include a busy intersection or a popular city center. Finally, landmarks are external physical objects that act as reference points. Landmarks can be a store, mountain, school, or any other object that aids in orientation when way-finding." -Ethan Sundilson, Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science