Making the good easy: the smart code alternative.

• Author: Duany, Andres
• Position: Zoning law

It is legally difficult to build good urban places in the United States. The vast majority of conventional zoning codes prohibit the replication of our best examples of urbanism--places like Nantucket, Williamsburg, or even "Main Street U.S.A." in Disneyland. This situation has been profoundly damaging. Our current codes are based on a theory of urbanism that is decidedly anti-urban. They separate land uses, decrease densities, and increase the amount of land devoted to car travel, prohibiting the kind of urbanism that typifies our most beloved urban places.

Ironically, by being anti-urban, conventional codes are also anti-environment. Through separation, districting, and rigid statistical procedure, zoning has forced us to think in terms of separating the human habitat from the natural one when they are really co-dependent. The natural environment is better protected when cities are viable places for humans to live. Conventional zoning, however fails to recognize this reality by prohibiting true urbanism and substituting it with the "anti-city" (1)--a landscape composed of monofunctional, single-use zones. True urbanism is diverse, compact, pedestrian, and celebratory of the public realm. Conventional zoning gives us only a disaggregated version of urbanism, commonly known as sprawl, which does not constitute a viable human habitat.

What is needed is a fundamentally different vision of how cities should be coded. This article lays out an example of a completely new genre of urban planning code--the Smart Code. (2) The Smart Code exemplifies how the principles of urbanism and environmentalism can be mutually protected and enhanced. It is strongly aligned with the notion of "smart growth," a planning and environmentalist movement based on the goals of environmental protection and sustainable development. (3)

The Smart Code is based on an explicit, normative theory, known as the Transect, that links human and natural environments in one conceptually continuous system. (4) The Transect concept promotes an urban pattern that is sustainable, coherent in design, and composed of an array of livable, humane environments. (5) Its principles are aligned with those of ecological and regional planners and urban theorists who have called for the need for a more enlightened approach to our current methods of urban expansion and regulation. (6)

1. SMART GROWTH CONCEPTS

   Principles of smart growth, sustainable development, and New Urbanism have dominated discussions about urban form and sprawl in the last decade. (7) In its call for compact development, mixed use, and public transit, smart growth has naturally allied with a number of movements: historic preservation, downtown redevelopment, environmentalism, visual quality, public transit, bicycling, and pedestrianism. (8)

   The need for smart growth extends beyond the bounds of urban planning practice. The problem of urban deconcentration has been expounded by environmentalists, (9) as well as economists. (10) Both groups are now intimately involved in exposing the liabilities of current urban growth patterns. Environmentalists speak of the need to reduce the ecological footprint of cities, whereas economists speak in terms of rectifying externalities and social costs. In either case, the objectives are fundamentally the same.

   Many authors have focused on designing specific solutions to these consolidated views. They have addressed the need for compact, walkable urban areas with mixed uses that re-invigorate the public realm; lessen reliance on auto use; enable public transit; and socially, culturally, and economically integrate regions. (11)

   Smart growth principles address two related problems: spatial separation of land use and lack of mobility. Remedies for the problem of spatial separation include mixing land uses and creating diverse environments similar to traditional, older cities. Possible solutions for the lack of mobility include compact development and the promotion of public transit. Implementing these solutions requires concentrating, rather than dispersing employment and services. It involves increasing pedestrian access, clustering housing, and mixing land use types, rather than segregating them in Euclidean fashion. Remedying the problems of special separation and lack of mobility would combat sprawl by supporting a balanced urban development pattern that creates inclusive housing, supports home-based business, defines the public realm, facilitates pedestrian accessibility, and minimizes the use of the car while supporting public transit.

   Since World War II, conventional urban growth has proceeded without the development of diverse neighborhood units. These "traditional neighborhood developments" should ideally form the basis of the settlement unit. If urban areas were oriented around the mobility pattern of the pedestrian, the neighborhood unit would be generally organized within a quarter mile radius and would contain a mix of housing types, as well as structures that meet the essential daily needs of residents, such as parks, schools, and stores.

   In addition to emphasizing diversity in neighborhood settlement, the smart growth concept views pedestrian flow as the central means of transportation. (12) A fine-tuned network of roadways would disperse traffic, increase accessibility for the pedestrian, and keep major arterials from cutting through neighborhoods. The concept that automobile-oriented development should be minimized is a recurrent theme in much of the scholarship devoted to improving urban development. (13) Environmentalism and sustainable development practices figure prominently in reducing automobile dependency and increasing pedestrian mobility. It is argued that compact urban form reduces vehicle miles traveled (14) and decreases energy consumption and air pollution. (15) While these findings are continually debated in a war of numbers, it is not contested that public transit-oriented compact development patterns consume much less land than sprawl. (16) Fundamentally, smart growth is about the reciprocal goals of environmental protection and urban quality of life. Traditional urbanism, which is compact and pedestrian oriented, provides significant protection to the environment by reducing land consumption and emphasizing the importance of infill development. It is the necessary corollary of protecting ecologically valuable resources.

2. THE IMPLEMENTATION or SMART GROWTH

   1. Conventional Codes

      Most critics agree that the main problem with our current method of urban growth is sprawl. There is widespread agreement on how the current pattern should be remedied. Eco-villages, sustainable communities, smart growth plans, and New Urbanist developments are all based on an overlapping set of objectives. Despite this convergence of opinion and a large amount of publicity, widespread redirection of urban growth in the United States is proceeding at a painfully slow rate. (17)

      A number of reasons have been identified for the continued use of unsound urban patterns: a traditional preference for low-density housing, (18) racism and white flight, (19) lending practices and federal subsidies, (20) construction practices, (21) and systems of governance. (22) However, the worst of them comes from the field of planning itself: the rigid manner in which planning regulates urbanist ideals in its implementation devices--the separation and spatial scattering of urban land uses that is endemic to the vast majority of zoning ordinances and subdivision regulations imposed in the United States.

      Empirical studies have verified this. A recent survey of land use regulation in the State of Illinois verified the extent to which planning is the victim of its own devices. An analysis of the regulations of 168 cities and counties found mixed use zoning to be limited; smart growth tools almost non-existent; and proscriptive requirements for lot sizes, setbacks, road widths and parking decidedly in favor of low-density sprawl and urban fragmentation. (23) Pendall's study of land use regulation decisively linked land use controls to sprawl, (24) and a study of smart growth plans found a blatant lack of connection between smart growth rhetoric and corresponding implementation devices. (25)

      There has been some movement among states to codify smart growth concepts. (26) A study by the American Planning Association's Growing Smart Project produced a comprehensive analysis of the degree to which state legislatures have adopted planning reforms consistent with smart growth. (27) Salkin found that approximately 1000 land-use reform bills had been introduced in state legislatures in 1999 alone. (28)

      These developments "level the playing field" and allow the possibility of smart growth models to compete in the marketplace. However, local land regulation is defiantly unchanged. (29) Clearly a reworking of the tools of planning implementation has not kept pace with the rigorous denouncement of current patterns of urban growth at the local level. (30) This should be cause for concern. Why have the regulatory devices that implement planning objectives failed to change? More specifically, why do conventional zoning regulations and subdivision ordinances persist in their proscription of suburban sprawl?

      One reason for this stagnation is that planning is mired in a culture of separation that makes it difficult to effectuate systemic change. For example, planning is stymied by a self-imposed system of specialization: planning professionals include economic development planners, transportation planners, and environmental planners--all competing to make their own issue the dominant force in development politics. This kind of specialization also characterizes the development industry where, largely as a result of our current system of zoning, developers and lenders specialize in building or financing only certain types of developments.

      Another reason for planning's stagnation is its...