Conventional zoning became popular in the 1920s as an instrument of planning toward the orderly development of towns and cities.

In theory, it was meant to promote the health and prosperity of the public by regulating zones of exclusive use that were both of an appropriate kind in themselves and compatible with each other. Zoning was conceived as a kind of futures market establishing the volume and character of projected development and guaranteeing that all players, public and private, would abide by its provisions over time.

In practice, however, its verbal and numerical prescriptions relative to promoting project and city form proved to be very imprecise. Appropriate use became a much less important issue to be regulated than the entitled amount of gross usable space and the physical envelope of buildings for new projects.

Zoning codes dealt so clumsily with these issues, however, so most development decisions were eventually removed from the administrative and technical realm and were resolved through the political process. Since the 1940s, and increasingly in our day, almost every development issue is being resolved by a city council vote, or the threat of one. Central to the political battles of the last couple of generations raging around the bending or breaking of zoning rules has been a project’s superior design.

Meritorious architectural form has been used as a lever to extract maximum entitlement advantage from municipal authorities nationwide. Yet, uniqueness in American architecture since the 1950s has been synonymous with the anti-urban, personal modernist project visions of star architects.

At an increasing pace, zoning paired with project-focused architectural design has been used by developers and their architects for personal advantage and to the detriment of the public good. The instrument that was meant to guarantee order in urban development has become the means of destabilizing the form of cities nationwide.

Never has there existed such a gulf between the values of the architectural elite of this country and the taste of the classes that are the regulators and consumers of their architecture. Never has there been such a distrust of developers and their motives. The two are crucially related and are feeding the truly irrational and onerous public process regulating development.

The new urbanism has been defined as a movement to reclaim urban centers and to contain peripheral sprawl. Central to the new urbanist agenda is the development of coherent towns and cities that are both public space-centered and possess a continuous fabric of buildings. A new definition of codes and coding is necessary in order to accomplish such a vision of urban development and redevelopment.

New urbanist codes take an entirely different approach to the matter of controlling urban form. What is valued above all else is the ability of individual buildings to be active participants in generating great places in the city. What is regulated from the beginning is the urban and ecological form of the city itself. And not in the “one shoe fits all” manner of zoning, but rather by taking into account the specific character of neighborhoods, districts and corridors unique to each city.

The regulation of the urban behavior of buildings is obligatory. Further regulation through style is optional. In certain settings style can be prescribed. In others it can be free. In certain places, working with traditional architectural languages, including the modern, may be required. Other places may promote variety and encourage personal experimentation in design.

New urbanist development codes demand an explicit response by individual projects to a small number of fundamental issues of urban design: building typology, building placement, parking, service, building envelope, thresholds, ground floor. The form of the city comes about by the constancy, repetition and variety of each project’s response to this narrow set of coding provisions.

Style by itself can never be used as an excuse for skirting new urbanist regulations. If individual developments can prove that they are exceptional contributors to the fabric of buildings, character of open space and landscape framework specific to their city, then entitlement exceptions may be considered. What are the grounds for such exceptions? Even better contributions to urban and ecological form, not stylistic pyrotechnics.