City Rules: How Regulations Affect Urban Form

By Emily Talen

City Rules offers a challenge to students and professionals in urban planning, design, and policy to change the rules of city-building, using regulations to reinvigorate, rather than stifle, our communities. Emily Talen demonstrates that regulations are a primary detriment to the creation of a desirable urban form. While many contemporary codes encourage sprawl and even urban blight, that hasn't always been the case-and it shouldn't be in the future. 
 
Talen provides a visually rich history, showing how certain eras used rules to produce beautiful, walkable, and sustainable communities, while others created just the opposite. She makes complex regulations understandable, demystifying city rules like zoning and illustrating how written codes translate into real-world consequences. Most importantly, Talen proposes changes to these rules that will actually enhance communities' freedom to develop unique spaces.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Jun 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781610911764

Book preview

University.

1. Introduction

This is the story of how rules affect the physical character of cities. Using examples from around the United States, the book illustrates how rules, which collectively become codes,¹ affect urban pattern and form in explicit and direct ways. These effects are not well understood. The effects are known in general terms, on such things as density and land value, but the effect on physical form and character of place is often obscured. Just what kind of environment is our layered legal framework concocting?

Given their impact, the neglect of rules—the failure to understand their effect—is surprising. In the United States, most urban land has, at one time or another, either been prescribed by a legally enforceable rule or built in defiance of one. Yet there are few sources that document this effect. This is problematic since, increasingly in our legalistic environment, codes are the basis for public decision making in all matters pertaining to the built environment.

This book documents the rise and fall of rules—from hopeful means of urban redemption to legalistic burden. Most importantly, it dissects the best and worst urban places and seeks to determine whether they are the result of explicit rules. This requires making a judgment about what best and worst mean. Generally, my evaluation is based on the degree to which rules sustain good urbanism. I define good urbanism as compact urban form that encourages pedestrian activity and minimizes environmental degradation; encourages social, economic, and land use diversity as opposed to homogeneity; connects uses and functions; has a quality public realm that provides opportunities for interaction and exchange; offers equitable access to goods, services, and facilities; and protects environmental and human health. Bad urbanism is the opposite: disconnected, automobile dependent, land consumptive, environmentally degrading, single-use, homogeneous, inequitable, and inaccessible, and with a low-quality, poorly designed public realm (see Talen 2011).

The connection between rules and good or bad urbanism is a matter of understanding both the effect and the neglect of rules. For example, the rules of Chandler, Arizona, created the landscape shown in figure 1.1—its municipal code states that there must be one parking space for every 250 square feet of commercial floor area. But there is also an absence of rules that might have been used to mitigate the negative effects (see box 1.1). Nothing in the rules prohibits parking from being the defining feature of the landscape.

Analyzing the effect of rules is a form of social history, and much is revealed: what do rules say about how American society values place, as well as neighborhood functionality, community organization, and social integration? Unraveling this is complicated by the fact that both the effect of rules as well as the motivations behind them, over the course of the twentieth century, became obscured. Rules are a reflection of values, but now, given the disconnect between rule and effect, it is hard to imagine that what people really want is sprawl, bad urban form, and monotony. This is certainly not what early city planners thought they were creating. As new code-reform efforts move forward, there needs to be a clear understanding and explanation of the underlying purposes and end goals. Any loss of connection between rule and purpose risks compromising the effect of the rule and obscuring more objectionable motivations.

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Figure 1.1. Shopping mall in Chandler, Arizona, a product of what rules require and what thev allow.

Source: USDA-FSA-APFO Aerial Photography Field Office, NAIP 2007.

Box 1.1. Rules that might have mitigated the negative effects of parking

No parking between building and street

Parking maximums

Limits on size of surface parking lots

More compact car spaces to save space

Reduction of parking for mixed-use projects

Shared parking credits (where there are distinctly different hours of operation)

Substitution of on-street parking counts for required parking

Walkways through parking lots

Alley access that would make it easier to locate parking behind buildings

Required bicycle parking

Any hope of changing the rules that have disfigured the American landscape—sprawling and often disorienting, while at the same time, almost paradoxically, hy-persegregated—requires a keen understanding of the source, historical evolution, and effect of these rules. Through their manipulation of pattern, use, and form, rules have a strong impact on quality of life, affecting everything from patterns of daily life to the demographic makeup of schools to who lives next to whom. Are good urban places the result of a conscious coding effort? What specific rules can we thank for the great places we have, or blame for the other, dispiriting ones? When we experience a great city, neighborhood, street, or place, how much of it can be attributed to rules? Understanding this connection can help us to avoid the types of rules that result in bad places, and embrace and build on those that create good ones.

Because I focus on the American experience, zoning dominates this story—it is the mother lode of city rules. Other kinds of rules, such as utility regulations, deed restrictions, neighborhood review panels, impact fees, and federal laws, can affect urban form, sometimes dramatically, but zoning has had the broadest effect. Planners, real estate developers, environmentalists, and citizens have a largely negative view of zoning, and in the decades since its adoption in the early twentieth century, zoning has taken on a significant amount of baggage. But there is nothing intrinsic about zoning that should elicit such a negative response: zoning is simply a set of rules tied to a specific location. Curiously, rules by any other name, such as deed restrictions, often escape a more negative judgment. Deed restrictions did significantly impact the public realm, but in many areas, their control of built form was subsumed by zoning and subdivision regulation in the early twentieth century (with the notable exception of Houston, which never embraced zoning but which continues to control urban form via restrictive deeds and covenants). Zoning has a colorful history, full of antics used in the unrelenting effort to avoid it (Flint 1977; Burgess 1994). Creative circumvention included, for example, the invention of new building types (e.g., the apartment hotel) as a way of skirting zoning rules (Plunz 1993). In the 1950s zoning represented the view of the world at the time, as inequality, exclusion, and automobile dependence were rendered in built form. Zoning is what is behind the paving of paradise (Stone 2004), the inflation of housing costs (Glaeser and Gyourko 2002), and the constant drain on the implementation of smarter growth (Talen and Knaap 2003). Largely, this has to do with the gradual expansion of zoning’s requirements. Figure 1.2 shows how zoning between 1948 and 2005 enforced the gradual expansion of lot size requirements in one American city. The change might seem modest for a single lot, but the cumulative effect of this rule change has been dramatic—spreading the city out, increasing car dependence and land consumption, and reducing both the possibility of walkable access and the viability of public transit. Many communities are now trying to reverse these expansion trends, making it, once again, legal to build compact urban form.

Despite the mythology of rugged individualism, rules have always been an integral part of the American experience, and in the early twentieth century, it seemed natural to have all kinds of rules guiding our behavior (box 1.2). Rules are essential to city building—even Adam Smith knew that.² The question is what kinds of cities do rules create? The answer is something of a mystery. Though rules often function as the default urban policy position—perceived as a way of getting something for nothing, without having to spend public dollars—it is a policy position we promote recklessly. Rules guide what gets built where, often without a clear objective. The character of place that results, de facto, is usually not preconceived, let alone desired. With no one and nothing in charge of maintaining an overall idea about what cities should be like, rules become the default overseers of urban form.

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Figure 1.2. Changes in multifamily residential zoning in the R-4 district (originally, the B district) in Tempe, Arizona.

While there are many other forces to blame for the disfigured American urban landscape, city rules are not helping. Over the course of the last century, American urban development has been characterized by inner-city disinvestment, sprawl, segregation, and a general lack of quality when it comes to urbanism. Rules not only contribute to this, they actively block better ambitions. The places we love and flock to—such as Nantucket or Annapolis—can be difficult to create without a team of lawyers to change or circumvent the rules.

Without a clear connection between rule and objective—or better yet, between rule and physical outcome—city planners are left holding the bag on rules they probably care little about, trying to defend them in the face of a public that is at best apathetic about regulations. Planners can only dream of a world in which a clear connection between helping to create good cities is linked to the rules they are required to enforce. And rules, once put into law, are not easily gotten rid of. Plans and politicians can be ignored or voted out, but rules and laws last. Case in point: two years after New York became the first U.S. city to adopt a comprehensive zoning ordinance in 1916, the planning committee and its staff were fired. The basic outlines of the code endured.

Box 1.2. City Ordinances We Should Know and With Which We Should Comply

Cruelty to animals; billboards; protection from fire; firearms; food and milk inspection; garbage; hack, express and automobile hire; ice; injury to property; licenses; medicine samples; milk and cream dealers; minors; numbering houses; quarantine regulations; shows, vulgar and immoral; slot machines; regulation of speed; spitting; street car fare; streets, alleys and sewers; setting out of trees; tuberculosis; cutting of weeds; weights and measures; building and factory inspection; smoke inspection; registry of births.

Pamphlet produced for Sioux City, Iowa, 1913.

Source: Van Buren (1915, 411).

Rules affect urban pattern and form in a myriad of large and small ways. A seemingly simple rule, such as the requirement that apartments must have a second means of egress, can affect building size and configuration, and, ultimately, how cities are experienced. A bay window may require approval from a public commission, with the result being that bay windows become a rarity. Maybe a certain density level triggers design review, resulting in lower densities. Rules about minimum distance between stairs may determine how many units front a street. Laws might be used to stimulate the consumption of certain materials, such as brick and steel, which in turn impacts the character of urban form. The number of parking spaces required for each housing unit can have a profound effect on building configuration. Chicago’s antibetting law of 1905 had the effect of converting race tracks to housing (Hoyt 1933). Consider the federal tax code and its effect on urban form via rules about loan guarantee. Federally backed mortgages of single-family, detached housing have been one of the biggest generators of

Reviews for City Rules

[jonerthon-437513 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Technical but plainspoken. This is part of my studies for my professional certification exam, but has some value for anyone curious about the origins and practicalities behind zoning. It does feel a bit depressing at some points, as failed land use interventions and unintended consequences are listed in great detail. But ultimately I got through that because it's a fast and accessible read.