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City rules: How regulations affect urban form

Article  in  URBAN DESIGN International · December 2012

DOI: 10.1057/udi.2012.18

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Book Review
City rules: How regulations affect urban form
Emily Talen
Island Press, Washington, DC, 2012, 236pp., £22, $35.00 (paperback) ISBN-13: 978-1597266925;
ISBN-10: 1597266922
URBAN DESIGN International (2012) 17, 351–352. doi:10.1057/udi.2012.18
Do rules constrain the creativity of designers to
innovate future planning models? Do rules inhibit
the natural growth of cities or do we need a
prescription of rules to prevent disorder? They say
rules are meant to be broken. And yet, there is
always a search of balance between what should be
done and what works in reality. The evocative title
of City Rules: How Regulations Affect Urban Form by
Emily Talen entails the challenge of why rules, or
codes, are important for city planning and how they
are determined in urban development.
The book is well organised in seven chapters,
each of them being well illustrated with extensive
examples. Talen begins introducing a general ques-
tion of how planning rules affect the city by making
an historical account of how rules emerged.
Her description unravels the connection between
the rules applied and the outcomes (physical
places) that take place by focusing on codes that
affect primarily street pattern, land-use arrange-
ment and three-dimensional form. Talen then turns
to an exploration of how regulating a place began
with the introduction of city rules. Although the
book is centred in American cities, it takes into
consideration how the European system, specifi-
cally in Germany, began to promote rules through
zoning.
The interesting thing about zoning is that it
began with the purpose of protecting the poor.
Starting with New York City’s comprehensive
zoning code of 1916, where studies suggested that
congested streets let to juvenile delinquency and
excessive stair climbing was bad for women yzoning
was initially cast as a means of keeping housing costs
down for the working classes. The way European
planners saw it, apartment buildings were inflating
the cost of land, and density reductions via zoning
would alleviate that pressure (p. 28). The author
notes that in reality the reverse happened. Zoning
is a tool that at times can be counterproductive in
the goal of achieving public health. Where zon-
ing was supposed to protect the poor, it only
r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1357-5317 URBAN DESIGN International
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increased segregation by separating the poor from
the wealthy.
Following the overview of the creation of rules,
Talen devotes each subsequent chapter to three
elements of urbanism: pattern, use and form. She
explains how each of these elements, though
interrelated, is impacted by zoning, subdivision
regulation and government facilities. Beginning
with the effects on pattern, Talen presents plans
and images that show a variety of examples of
how building codes affect pattern, from homo-
geneous housing developments to isolated patch-
works of urban sprawl. The effects are translated
into weak connectivity, poor attention to the pede-
strian realm and the limitation of block lengths.
Therefore, this would suggest, other things being
equal, that longer streets would benefit traffic
flow and shorter streets would favour pedes-
trians. The author describes this as subdivision
regulations that contained rules of street length and
width made a significant social effect (p. 46). This
calls in mind of how the spatial configurations in
which we live and move embed a social dimen-
sion of the physical arrangement of forms and
elements that we can see.
In the case of use, Talen explains the difference
of rules between separating people and separa-
ting functions. In the first, zoning is concerned
about not with what but with whom (p. 93).
Separating uses with a conscious purpose of class
separation contributed to social exclusion. Thus,
zoning became a tool for social reform. Socially
mixed settlements emerged as an economic neces-
sity. Rules that separate functions became an issue
in relation to whether mixed uses could be
distributed in single-use zones in a balanced way.
The effects resulted in developments that included
diversity of housing types in relatively close
proximity. However, some mixed-use districts were
adapted in order to guarantee that dwellings had
access to vehicular and pedestrian circulation
systems.
Vol. 17, 4, 351–352
 Book Review
It is logical to think that restrictions of use are
necessary. People want to live in close proximity
to their work, residential areas want to be kept
away from industrial activities or people want to
limit businesses in their neighbourhoods. Finding
the ‘right mix’ is not an easy task. People want
to be separated from retail shops and yet not too
far away from them, or having them within reach.
However, ‘within reach’ is a relative term. It
can mean walking 5 min or driving five blocks to
get to a retail store. In many cases, rules can be
subject to ‘unseen’ flexibility. For example, many
people now work from home without having the
need to commute or pay for more central access.
In social terms, the importance of use rules is not
to mitigate the co-presence between urban space
and society, but to make them more inclusive.
Similarly, Talen points out that rules affecting
form can have a major effect in pattern and scale.
Illustrating the building form of Manhattan, she
argues that as a three-dimensional character form
is subjected to three aspects: street width, building
height and frontage. Regulations limiting encroach-
ment and the requirement for setbacks in buildings
gave a new perspective to urban form. Height rules
affected more than the profile of the skyline itself. It
meant creating interior courtyards or adapting
airshafts in order to maximise rentable space under
height limits. Frontage rules were made as devices of
352 r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1357-5317 URBAN DESIGN International
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transition (p. 141) between the public, semi-private
and private realms. What became necessary within
coding rules was a uniform frontage that became
the establishment of a building line. This had a
major effect in the permeability of form in terms
of ventilation, which affected height, size, shape
and ‘character’ of the buildings and their distance
apart. In the case of New York, the Ordinance of
1916 evolved in creating different types of ‘height
districts’ generated by such rules. Perhaps, in some
way, the geometry of Manhattan’s skyscrapers and
the evolution of its skyline is a pure consequence of
such rules.
The book has plenty to enthral academics and
professionals. Although it is important to read
City Rules with a critical eye, there is also much
reason to commend the author for attempting to
forge a new perspective of how architects and
designers are not always able to determine what
form should a building take or what can be public
or private, small or large, single or mixed. It is the
rules that do so. Most interesting to the readers of
URBAN DESIGN International is Talen’s intention
to finding a balance between what can be flexible
from city rules and what can be predicted for
future urban planning.
Laura Narvaez
University College London, London, UK
Vol. 17, 4, 351–352