The urbanist traditions of our country are profound and have generated some of the most livable, prosperous and equitable cities ever built in the world. This is a continent settled by immigrants of limited means. Yet, its Villages, towns and cities flourished, and developed well into the twentieth century possessing a distinctive American character.
 
Early settlements whether French (Biloxi, New Orleans), Spanish (Los Angeles, San Antonio, Santa Fe), or English (Savannah, Philadelphia, Charleston) were diverse in form but similar in principle. Unlike their European precedents, American settlements were founded under the expectation of speculative growth and profit. They were, therefore, organized under a different set of common principles than the towns of the Old World:
 
Hope and hype have been a form of currency and an item of faith in American city building since the beginning. Our traditional urban form was open ended rather than predetermined. Town founders typically projected grids of streets blocks and lots without a fixed vision of a built outcome.
 
The process of completion of American towns was driven by incremental development, not holistic implementation. Individual interests were often in conflict with the common good.
 
Initially, the political process that regulated American urban growth was reciprocal. The property right to build was absolute but the entitlement to a particular project was relative and changeable over time. People gave their consent in promoting urban change on the assumption that their future requests for action would be similarly honored.

An American aesthetic emerged that reflected the necessity for permanence. The definition and repetition of a menu of desirable, successful building and place types became the norm. The visual prominence and imperial character of monumental composition was uncommon in North America until recently. The market drove the development process more than any overarching source of authority.
 
Citizen pragmatists largely led the growth of American cities. There were few rules and fewer public meetings. There was trust in expertise and common sense. Can-do attitudes permeated every physical improvement decision. This clarity of purpose can be traced through every type of early American settlement, from the smallest to the most complex, from the most rural to the most urban.
 
The foundation Urbanism of this continent was lightly regulated for almost four hundred years, and until approximately 1920. It produced places of extraordinary character that are in many ways the basis of our American identity today: Manhattan, Kennebunkport, Charleston, Saint Augustine, Kansas City, Santa Fe, Santa Barbara and countless more.
 
In the aftermath of the Civil War the country had began to industrialize at a dizzying pace. The tender forms of regulation that had routinely produced harmonious settlements until then began to falter and then fail. Inadequate parklands, poor provisions for transportation, poorly designed increased density, absence of environmental safeguards, insensitive architectural design, all produced for the first time ever, underperforming American cities that were ugly, unhealthful, and socially and economically un-redeeming.
 
What followed was a political crisis of unprecedented proportions. The first reaction to the faltering industrial city was an impulse to sanitize it by greening it at the center, and building new suburbs at its edge. The work of Olmstead and, later of the City Beautiful Movement, are the best examples of this reformist urbanist agenda. With the dawn of the new century, the rate of growth, population increase, immigration and disorderly physical change accelerated. By the 1920s, the need for new administrative instruments to control the most virulent forms of urban disarray became a pressing priority.
 
Zoning as we know it today was invented at this time. The theory behind it was sound, based upon the industrialized urban conditions of the time: To separate uses, densities, and incompatibilities of all kinds in order to contain the most toxic among them. Like all good ideas, this one soon evolved by grafting itself to the dominant trends of its time, only to eventually become itself a kind of virus promoting disorderly urban growth. How did that come to pass?
 

From Europe came the contributions of the International Congresses for Modern Architecture (CIAM) beginning in the late 1920s. Inspired and led by the French architect and urbanist LeCorbusier, internationalist modernists sacrificed the traditional city to the automobile by radically expanding and isolating right-of ways, vertically separating people and vehicles, rejecting the importance of figural public space, radically expanding the size of city blocks, abandoning traditional architectural typologies and isolating uses.
 
From the United States came post World War II sprawl. Fueled by homogeneous production housing tracts, ugly commercial strips, isolated high-rise buildings, and enabled by highway and freeway construction, American growth produced unprecedented congestion, ugliness, impermanence and petroleum dependence.
 
By its immense size and immature structure and character, the out-of-control modernist metropolis has eclipsed the settlements of all of humanity’s past. There is no continent, region or culture that has been spared cancerous, horizontal, accelerating growth by abandonment; that is, single­use sprawl or car-serviced hyper-concentration in limited area precincts.
 
By default, the form of regulation that has managed and sustained this kind of untenable worldwide urban development and redevelopment is zoning. Zoning has morphed and changed over three generations. Yet, one thing is plainly clear. Harmonious urban growth cannot be properly guided by it.

There is emerging consensus that it is the weapon of choice by which chaotic urban form has come to prevail in the world in all of its pathological details. Some of the most salient characteristics of zoning are revealing in this respect:
 
Fixity: Uses are isolated in zones and intensities of intended development are established. It is not uncommon for these to remain unchanged over half a century despite changes in the economy, in technology, in living standards, in citizen choices and in the fiscal condition of individual cities. Zoning is an exchange that determines the possibility of economic growth through construction and real estate transactions. In an electronic age accustomed to instantaneous fluctuations and rapid change, zoning has become static and obsolete, an instrument appropriate to an earlier industrial economy.
 
Use-Obsession: In the interest of preventing incompatibility, zoning focuses on quarantining sectors of cities by exclusive use. Zones of individual use are never considered for the aggregate negative effect of their size. Square miles of single use that ravage the countryside are not unusual in our country. As single use zones increase by size, the need to communicate between and among them is relegated to an automobile trip. Extended over an entire continent, this idea has generated a state of sprawl so virulent and extensive that traditional Urbanism is deemed not conforming or obsolete, while all chaotic common practice becomes viable by default. Car domination reigns and social separation is the fate of those not lucky enough to own the number of cars their family needs to survive.

At the other end of the metropolitan density spectrum, many-single use zones exist without safeguards for generating ground floor continuity, incorporating a mix of uses or defining a public realm. The result is gaggles of massive buildings, isolated like vertical cul-de-sacs and equally dependent on auto mobility.
 
Imprecision: The obsessive emphasis on regulation by use results in anemic instructions on the nature of intended city form, its Architecture, public realm, streetscape and street network. When present, regulations are oblivious to the existing physical conditions of the areas being regulated. Partial, general and otherwise inadequate instructions are typical of zoning as a tool. Thoroughfares are proposed for moving cars alone without any concern for their effect on the land uses surrounding them. Blocks are almost never considered in their capacity to accommodate buildings of different kinds, to enable their parking and service or to promote a public realm of public space. Proposed buildings are described in mathematical and abstract terms alone. Off-street parking ratios are imposed with no understanding of the consequences on urban and architectural form. The tyranny of isolated, arbitrary, small, fixed details drives away any temptation to think holistically. As a result, imprecision as to the intended character of places reigns.
 
Uncertainty: Vagueness is a key malady of zoning. Entitlements are applied proportionally to all properties independent of size. Every building is typically designed as large as the entitlement allowed on its site and with no concern for relating to other buildings. This induces a state of doubt about the intentions of any and all landowners and developers relative to those developing in the lots and blocks surrounding them. Citizens are often scandalized by the gross disparity between what zoning promises and the reality of what suddenly appears appended to the body of the city. There is such adverse reaction to unanticipated or ill-fitting projects, which is almost all that zoning ever produces, that a couple of new citizen subspecies have appeared of late: The citizen activist in constant alert, and the hyperactive developer, ever eager to overpower them. The result is a polarized public process with pro- and anti-growth forces wasting each other’s time and their community’s interest by not being able to address an appropriate development vision for their city that benefits all.
 
Autonomy: Urban growth based on zoning is random and intentionally silent about the future form, social utility or environmental consequences of projects. Micromanaging zoning has been elevated to unprecedented levels of political intensity. Decisions are driven by framing Byzantine arguments to justify projects. As a result, inattention to the truly significant details of city-making is prevalent. Regulation is sharply divided and isolated by discipline. Each discipline acts independently of others. The interests of individual building projects usually dominate public space and landscape-related common concerns. Transportation and Public Work priorities trump building standards and just about everything else. The ideal environment of our time, evidenced almost everywhere emerges by default, produced by administrative fragmentation: The six-lane highway surrounded by boxes, each ringed by a sea of parked cars.
 
Overregulation: Zoning is in practice a virtually immutable form of regulation. It is not unusual for a code to have been in place for over half a century. The only possibility for modifying zoning over time is a Talmudic process of interpretation layered upon its original intentions and provisions. Every exception, every conflict, every doubt becomes yet another layer of over-detailed regulation. Over decades of changes and additions, zoning codes can become bureaucratic albatrosses, impenetrable even to those who use them daily.
 
As a result, the political process is distorted. Confusion over municipal priorities reigns. Planning Commission and City Council meetings consume much of their disposable time debating trivial technical concerns. Focus on quality is sacrificed to the increasing quantity of cases streaming in for consideration. Bathroom additions are fought more fiercely than the width of new streets. The entitlements per project are scrutinized more absolutely than their proposed building form. Public bodies forget to concentrate on consensus building based on broad agreements and squander their time arguing about the few marginal issues they tend to disagree on. The built city emerges from this process as a shadow of its true potential.
 
The performance of zoning over the last three quarters of a century has been a key factor in the displacement of the hallowed principles of American traditional Urbanism by a tepid, project-centered, anti-urban internationalism. The sense of American pragmatism and fair dealing is offended by this gross failing.
 
This book is written to describe Form-Based Codes, a method of regulating and coding, in support of another kind of Urbanism. One that promotes place-based planning and development, not suburban or urban sprawl.
 
Since 1990, urbanists representing all key professions with a stake in the human habitat have banded together into the Congress of the New Urbanism. Their explicit purpose is to reform development and planning practice in the U.S. and the world. By mid 2007 this organization had been joined by an astounding 3,250 people. The imperative being sought by the CNU and its members is that cities become once again livable, prosperous, socially enabling and beautiful. Their agenda reflects both the fundamental purposes and the emerging boldness of Urbanism on the ascendant.
 
The Charter of the New Urbanism provides the necessary principles for visioning traditional urban form. At the core of this theory are found the directions to addressing the two fundamental challenges underlying all Urbanism: How are settlements to be founded, and how are they to be managed over time in order to evolve and thrive to maximum advantage? The kind of sustainable Urbanism that is practiced through the Charter of the CNU aims at disciplined, varied and permanent urban growth: Forming walkable, type- diverse and use-flexible buildings and urban places, slowing the consumption of resources, minimizing damage to the environment, and securing the agricultural countryside and nature.

Form-Based Codes have emerged as the preferred instrument for implementing new urbanist ideas of all scales and in all settings: Greenfield, brownfield, infill, attached to both public and private projects. Many codes are already being written to secure the form and performance of municipalities and counties all over the United States.

The practice of such form-based coding is centered on a theory, a process and a format. The theory and process are common to all practitioners. The format is particular to each.
 
Three new urbanist tools among many others have become the necessary ingredients for the practice of form-based coding, the transect, spatial organization by Neighborhood, District and Corridor and entitlement by type.
 
The transect describes the power of Urbanism to produce immersive environments, where buildings, open space, landscape and infrastructure are combined to produce memorable, permanent places. It describes a spectrum of choices of development intensities from more urban to more rural. As a means to coding, it allows the deciphering and validating of existing settings, and promotes the design of new ones as integrated physical places, not disconnected ones.
 
The geography of Neighborhoods, Districts and Corridors replaces the endlessness of sprawl with the idea of regulating within clear identifiable spatial boundaries. This tool promotes physical variety and the presence of a rich array of uses, activities and services within pedestrian and transit sheds. It encourages the market to accommodate many kinds of households while minimizing dependence on the automobile as the only mobility option. As identifiable communities of common interests, people who live within Neighborhoods can then be actively involved in the management of their immediate surroundings.
 
Organizing entitlements by building type restores Architecture to its honored place at the center of city making. Architecture is framed in terms of generative patterns of dwelling form, not abstract metrics. Repeating these patterns as single-family houses, row houses, courts, commercial blocks, etc., generates a distinct building fabric, specific and unique to each urban setting. Some fabric can be homogeneous. Other can be diverse and highly mixed. By connecting the legal right to build with design in known and inherently compatible forms, cities can be grown that possess character specific to their culture and history.
 
The Process common to form-based coding is vision- and charrette-centered. FBCs are intentional and they are directed to guide future growth that is particular and desirable to each community. To this end, charrettes convene professionals in many fields to one place. Urban and architectural projects of remarkable depth are then designed by them in a compressed time frame, typically a week. Charrettes engage the community, city staff, and elected officials to respond to real and diverse needs, to inspire confidence overall, and to help in project implementation. They help build consensus and political confirmation by educating participants on how to seek a balance between their best private interests and the public good. Civic engagement, fairness and rapid resolution of private/public conflicts are often the common consequence of a well-run charrette, and the foundation of a transforming Form-Based Code.
 
The Format for FBCs may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, project to project or office to office. Yet the intentions underlying the construction of these codes are remarkably similar. They are all extensively illustrated, brief and succinct. They are typically understandable by all those with a stake in urban development, landowners, developers, councils and commissions and all the professionals that advise them. They are printed in large size so that their provisions can be clearly understood and assigned to particular properties.
 
The key difference between FBCs and conventional zoning is the relegation of regulation by use to a position ancillary and secondary to form. That is as it should be. The evidence over the centuries is overwhelming, that as economies evolve, the shell of the world’s most desirable cities and their buildings remains relatively stable. It is the uses they accommodate that change constantly. The disposable project is a passing aberration of the 20th Century. The wealth of all nations is embodied, more than in any other way, in the constant investment, the lavishing of resources upon their permanent buildings and cities.
 
Despite significant variations in the practice of Form-Based Codes, there is an emerging consensus on a common approach. The following are the key principles for guiding code writing towards sustainable urban development:
 
1 Vision Centered
Form-Based Codes are always written as part of a Master Plan. They are the outcome of a planning process that binds private and public interests onto a common vision for a desirable future. As a result, they are adopted with the complete confidence of elected and appointed officials, staffs and the community.
 
2 Purposeful
Conventional codes are unfocused. FBCs are priority driven and concentrate on regulating with an emphasis on those places that are prone to change. The kinds of physical adjustments that would render these places more useful and beautiful are clearly spelled out.
 
3 Place Based
All code prescriptions are carefully calibrated to be specific to the setting to which they apply. The analysis of existing natural, physical and social conditions within a project area is the point of departure for FBCs. Physical diversity is favored and guaranteed by providing for a wide variety of potential development and conservation intensities.
 
4 Regionally Diverse
The “one shoe fits all” nature of zoning is replaced by a commitment to difference. FBCs reflect the environmental and cultural conditions prevailing in the different parts of our country and aim to encourage place-making that is appropriate to them. This specificity to regional context has profound environmental consequences, as the form and performance of buildings and cities is fitted to their climate, resources and culture.
 
5 Consequential
Urbanism is not an exercise in beautification. It is an economic development engine. Form-Based Codes typically deliver a strategy for improvement which is calibrated to the local economic opportunities that the market can deliver. They are operated in the interest of bolstering the fiscal health of the community.
 
6 Precise
FBCs are typological in nature. Concrete, experience-derived metrics replace abstract gauges of future development such as Floor Area Ratios (FAR). Ranges of preferred types for designing open space, landscape, buildings and roads are prescribed in terms of concrete, familiar dimensional ranges. Growth by type guarantees compatibility among buildings and all other city-making ingredients as it operates within an understandable range of replicable models. Within this framework, the more that one builds, the better the city gets.
 
7 Integrated
The professional autonomy that is built into so much of current planning and development practice has resulted in a process where individuals end up working at odds with community interests. Building projects dominate and they are often as big as possible and often deny the public realm, the multimodal use of right-of-ways or the formation of an urban tree canopy. FBCs are set up to coordinate infrastructure, thoroughfares, buildings, space, and landscape design as they apply to a single project. Each project incrementally, and in accordance to its scale, completes all of these five dimensions of city building.
 
8 Binding
FBCs are cast in terms of standards that are obligatory, not guidelines that are optional. Standards provide development direction proactively and reward adherence to the community vision that they represent. Following the standards appropriate to a project speeds up the process of getting it entitled. As citizens begin to trust that their code routinely generates harmonious fabric, the contentious nature of the current planning process is diminished. Uncertainty about neighbors’ intentions is minimized.

9 Comprehensible
Zoning documents have evolved into massive, complicated, mostly written tomes that are often difficult to read, internally contradictory and impossible to understand. FBCs aim to be simply presented in a balance of words, diagrams and tables that are clear to common folk, landowners, developers and professionals without the need for theological interpretation from lawyers or expediters.
 
10 Adjustable
FBCs should be revisited regularly and be calibrated in the light of an evolving economy, changing community objectives and the concrete evidence represented by work completed under their provisions. They are typically so explicit and detailed that changes small and large can be made without a fuss. A community can come to control its destiny with confidence.
 
Currently, FBCs are being incorporated into project Master Plans, and area-wide Specific Plans. Increasingly, the coding of whole cities and even counties is leading in the direction of casting General Plans (Comprehensive Plans in various states) in a new urbanist frame. Jurisdictions that have engaged in a visioning process delivering a General Plan including a FBC and appropriate environmental analysis, should consider exempting individual projects from further environmental review. Such a code would also introduce a stricter and more effective level of regulation. As a matter of course, projects would be entitled more rapidly and with less scrutiny than zoning-fueled current, conventional development.
 
A sustainable world depends on the definition of architectural and natural forms that in their Urbanism promotes rich living experiences, permanent and resource-efficient designs, limited maintenance and reduced auto mobility. This is the most conclusive response to the inconvenient truth of global warming.
 
This volume describes in clear argument and significant detail the issues and techniques associated with the design and management of FBCs as an antidote to zoning and sprawl. Reading it and putting it to practice is an excellent point of departure for individuals and municipalities to safeguard and to grow their communities.

Originally published in Form-Based Codes: A Guide for Planners, Urban Designers, Municipalities, and Developers by Daniel G. Parolek, AIA, Karen Parolek and Paul C. Crawford, FAICP (Wiley).