The form of the New Urbanism is realized by the deliberate assembly of streets, blocks and buildings. In the American urban tradition, the cutting of a grid is the first presence of urban structure in the landscape. In this act of making a place, space is allocated for both public and private use—for buildings and for open spaces. Shaping this void in the city is an act of democratic responsibility. A plan is laid down by a governing body regulating private and public initiative in the construction of its parts. Public bodies, citizens, and entrepreneurs slowly generate streets, squares, and parks. Single buildings incrementally introduced into blocks eventually determine the character of the open spaces. It is at this most elemental scale, everyday in a myriad of fleeting and poignant moments, that Architecture and Urbanism define each other.

This very simple American city-making model has been virtually abandoned in recent years. For the last half century, the building of the public realm has been handled with little sense for those it serves and for the quality of life that it generates. Increasingly, Architecture has become the instrument of excessive self-expression. Individual buildings are often conceived as solely private, self-referential objects incapable of generating the public realm. Conversely, our public regulation system of zoning that controls the growth of the city has become overly verbal and complicated and incapable of accurately controlling determining physical form (especially because everything is negotiable). Zoning conflates issues of use, density and form to such an extent that it has spawned the unpredictability and visual chaos typical of the American city. Moreover, transportation-dominated infrastructure engineering has so preferred the accommodation of the car over human beings that the intended users of a public realm have been driven out. What many confuse as an unregulated urban landscape is the result of wrongly coded and uncritical design.

Because our current society has become so adept at creating and festishizing those things which are private, we shall focus on the problem of making that which we hold in common. In city-making parlance this is called the public realm. It is the shared space in society which brings people to gather together, to relate to one another and/or to be separate.

The New Urbanism seeks a fresh paradigm to guarantee and to order the public realm through individual buildings. Buildings, blocks and streets are interdependent. Each one contains to some degree the ingredients of all the others. Any decision to design streets in a particular manner seals the formal fate of blocks and buildings. Blocks of a specific character determine correspondent streets and buildings. Buildings of particular qualities dominate the blocks that contain them and the streets that surround them. The matrix for addressing the totality sum total of street, block and building principles of the New Urbanism is design—not policy planning—and amounts to an aesthetic position. But this position is not about the definition of style, particularly revivalist style. Nor is it about diminishing design freedom. Instead, it is suggests a method of design that is rooted in first causes and historical precedent. It is an attitude of expression that values the cultural variety inherent in climatic, social, economic and technical difference. It is also a professional ethic that stresses the integration of all architectural, engineering and design disciplines, the active collaboration among their practitioners and the participation of the public in the design process.

Above all else it is about insuring that there is a public realm. A city is a human artifact which is a collection of places and things. It is what we are born into and what we leave behind. What we hold in common is not only that which we share with the living, but that which we share with those before us and those after us. The city is therefore based on permanency.

An accessible (socially and physically) and truly shared place can be guaranteed at the most elemental scale through the following urbanist principles. These tenets prefer the human scale over the auto, balance private interests with public interests, and employ simple and physically determined methods over complicated and solely legal-minded.

The Street

Streets are not the dividing lines within the city. They are to be communal rooms and passages.

Pattern: A single given street is always to be part of a street network. Connectedness and continuity of movement within such a network will encourage the mixing of uses in the city. A variety of alternative paths connecting various destinations shall minimize the traffic load on any one street.

Hierarchy: There is to exist a variety of streets based on their pedestrian and vehicular loads. Under no circumstances will a street be abandoned solely to vehicular traffic. Conversely, assigning streets solely to pedestrian use will sap their vitality. Distances between intersections will favor the walkability of streets and a proper rhythm of building form on given blocks.

Figure: The architectural character of streets is to be based on their configuration in plan and section. Building heights are to be proportionally related to right-of-way widths. The number of traffic lanes balance vehicle flow and pedestrian crossing considerations. Shifts in scale within street sections are to be accomplished by the design of the landscape and all other vertical streetscape elements.

Detail: The design of streets shall favor their proper use by pedestrians. The governing principles are: minimized block radii to slow cars down at intersections and allow pedestrians to cross streets relatively quickly; landscaped medians to reduce the apparent width of streets; two-way streets that improve pedestrian crossing safety; properly designed curbs and sidewalks at intersections that accommodate the impaired. In addition, street parking protects pedestrians from the actual and perceived danger of moving traffic.


The Block

Blocks are the field on which unfolds both the building fabric and the public realm of the city. A versatile, ancient instrument, the traditional block allows a mutually beneficial relationship between people and vehicles in urban space.

Size: Blocks are to be square, rectangular or irregular in their shape. In their historical dimensions, they vary between a minimum of 250 and maximum of 650 feet. This dimensional range allows single buildings to easily reach the edges of blocks at all densities. It also forces parking to be located away from the sidewalk, either underground, in the middle of the block, or in the street.

Configuration: Independent of shape, city blocks are to be lotted so that all of their sides can define public space. A variety of widths and depths of individual lots determine the range of building types and densities that will eventually establish the intended city fabric. Alleys shall absorb parking and servicing loads and allow the outer faces of blocks to become more intensely pedestrian.

Streetground: At its perimeter, each block is to be divided into parkway, sidewalk and setback. Within each block lobbies, major ground floor interior spaces and public gardens of all kinds and sizes are to be understood as an extension of the public space of the city.

Streetwalls: The predominant visual character of all built fabric depends on several attributes of building envelopes: Their height, mandated setbacks and projections define the enclosure of the street. Their maximum width along with their height define a building's mass. Setback lines and the percentage build-to at their edges establish the fundamental rhythm between open space and built form on each block. Threshold elements at the setback line such as arcades, porches, stoops, balconies, loggias, chimneys, doors and windows, are the means by which buildings interface with and determine the life of the street.

Parking: The omnipresence of cars within the public realm threatens the vitality of cities. Accommodating the pedestrian is the first order of priority for parking. Cars are best accommodated in the middle of blocks or underground. Parking garages are acceptable as long as their ground floors at the sidewalk are occupied by pedestrian-related uses. Parking garages are regular buildings, and as such, need significant public faces and the built-in spatial redundancy necessary for a future use other than parking. Where parking lots are inevitable they should double up as significant public gardens.

Landscape: Regularly planted trees along blocks establish the overall space and scale of the street as well as that of the sidewalk. These artifacts from man's historical contact with nature remain a psychically critical element of Urbanism. The choice of particular species of trees and the patterns of their placement affect light and shadow, color, views - all significant aspects of the experience of place. Public open space types (civic parks, Neighborhood parks, etc.) and semi-public ones (quads, courtyards, patios) determine the internal character of urban blocks.

The Building

Buildings are the smallest increment of growth in the city. Their proper configuration and placement relative to each other determines the character of each settlement.

Use: Neither of the two opposing views of architectural use put forward by the Modern movement - functionalism and universal flexibility - adequately addresses the making of a city or town. They have resulted in exclusive zoning and the fragmentation and disconnection of parts of the city from each other. Buildings are to be designed by reference to their type, not solely their function. This allows for some changes in use and for multiple adaptations over time without compromising a building's form or rendering it obsolete. This is also critical from an environmental point of view. Building types are to be organized by reference to dwelling, employment or institutional first uses. Their definition is based on their common architectural ingredients.

Density: Floor Area Ratio (FAR) zoning regulations are totally abstract and favor the design of buildings as singular objects. They are to be replaced with building envelope guidelines that link entitlements with predictable physical, architectural definitions of the public realm. Density regulations should be phrased stated independently of building use and parking. Parking requirements should be set on a Neighborhood and District as opposed to a building-by-building basis. They are to be phrased by their intended architectural and urban consequences, not just numerically.

Form: There exist two kinds of buildings: fabric and monumental. Fabric buildings are to conform to all street and block-related rules and are consistent in their form with all other buildings of their kind. Monumental buildings are to be free of all formal constraints. They can be unique and idiosyncratic, the points of concentrated social meaning in the city.

Built form and landscape form are mutually dependent. The relationship of buildings to the public realm is reciprocal. Frontality shall allow three scales of architectural expression: One that emphasizes the public character of streets; another that reflects the semi-public nature of open spaces interior to the block; and a third that responds to the service nature of alleys and backyards.

Each building and garden is of a particular formal type. Each formal type is defined by reference to a set of determining formal characteristics. Adjacent buildings and gardens that share some of these characteristics generate a sense of cohesive framework in the city. The hand of the individual designer acting on stable types is the source of all architectural variety.

Architecture is deeply bound within the culture of each region of the country. Building types, not building styles, are the source of historical continuity in our towns and cities. Further design should be based on research that establishes the desirability and viability of historic, regional types; and also suggests newly created or imported types that may have possible local applications. It is from the mix of time-tested and new architectural models that authentic regional building differences can emerge.

The social content of buildings establishes their character and their scale. Far from being mere objects of consumption, buildings can be used for a variety of social ends: forming the public realm, expressing the importance of our public shared institutions and improving the daily working and home life of a citizenry.
Individual buildings shall become ecologically sensitive in their use of materials and energy. Regionally proven methods of building and easily available local and recyclable materials are to be favored over international techno-generalizations. Where economically possible, labor intensity in the building process shall be preferred. Low-energy consumption and pollution-free operations must be pursued.

Buildings are instruments for constructing time and place, not items to be consumed and discarded. For all practical and symbolic purposes, they are permanent fixtures in the landscape and the city. They should be designed with enough material and technical quality to allow their continuing renovation and reuse well beyond the expiration of their mortgage.

Coding

Specific street, block and building design rules for public or private developments shall be typically designed and presented in the form of a code. These codes are to be simply written and illustrated. They shall be brief and intensely physical in their prescriptions. Their content amounts to a covenant among the owners, designers and users of particular projects. Eventually their individual interests and actions will incrementally but inevitably generate the public realm.

The judicious application of codes can result in a beautiful and predictable fabric of buildings, open space and landscape that can structure Villages, towns, cities, and, indeed, the metropolitan region. Architecture and Urbanism shall not be separated; nor shall formal, social, economic, and technical/functional issues be considered in isolation.

The process of coding operates fully within the American urban tradition of safeguarding the public realm while allowing significant freedom for the designers of individual buildings. It is in the balance of such public and private interests and concerns that the future quality of life in the American city lies.