Crafting Form-Based Codes

Resilient Design, Policy, and Regulation

Korkut Onaran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351203135
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This book is for the well-meaning idealists – city planners, urban designers, municipalities, and developers – who are frustrated working within the messy political environments of local democracies. It provides practical tools for crafting form-based rules that can facilitate effective communication and consensus building that are essential in today's many regulatory cultures. It reviews some of the recent form-based codes and focuses on a lot-types approach to coding. It applies this approach to designing for the climate; it demonstrates that this approach can be used in deciphering the climatic responses of vernacular archetypes that have been evolved through generations, and then coding them via simple coding tools.

This book's purpose is twofold: (a) to provide a theoretical framework that clarifies why working within dynamic legal systems in local democracies is a necessity today for practitioners of urban planning and design, and how crafting dynamic rules may facilitate effective communication which is crucial within these cultures; and (b) to provide simple tools for crafting dynamic rules in form-based codes that can not only facilitate form-based consensus, but also address issues of sustainability and response to the climatic properties.

1 Introduction

“I wish I were some kind of a king; then I could design this amazing city and build it too!” This is a naïve yet common daydream among designers who are frustrated with the challenges of working within local democracies. It is also common within the design community to have unrealistic expectations of the regulatory processes, hoping that the regulations, once adopted, would act like a king’s decree and sanction the designer’s vision to be built. However, we live in democracies and our regulation cultures within the city halls are shaped by local democracies. “Democracy is the worst form of government,” once said Winston Churchill, then he added: “... except for all the others.”

This book aims at increasing awareness about the challenges of living – and the opportunities of thriving – within democratic regulation cultures as a planner and a designer. It brings together the realms of law, policymaking, and design. It provides a simple theoretical framework that underlines the importance of crafting dynamic rules within form-based codes, as an effective way to communicate various aspects of urban form, create consensus, and make informed decisions. To facilitate this, this book reviews effective ways of focusing on urban form in communicating complex planning issues and underlines the potential role of form-based codes in today’s dynamic regulation cultures. The book advocates a lot-types approach to form-based coding and explores how this approach can address sustainability and resilience through addressing urban form especially in hot climate regions that are expanding each day due to climate change. The book brings together the tone of a theoretical discussion with practical suggestions about crafting form-based codes. It develops several coding tools that can facilitate review processes especially in dynamic regulation cultures. It approaches regulation cultures in a holistic way and studies the relationships between review processes and various kinds of regulations to identify where they can be most useful. It advocates crafting dynamic lot types and creating interactive review processes where these lot types can evolve. It also argues that such a process has the potential of enhancing a collective awareness of urban form and intent, and as such would be more likely to encourage a sense of ownership by all participants.

To reiterate, this book’s purpose is twofold: (a) to provide a theoretical framework that clarifies why working within dynamic legal systems in local democracies is a necessity today for practitioners of urban planning and design, and how crafting dynamic rules may facilitate effective communication which is crucial within these regulation cultures, and (b) to provide simple tools for crafting dynamic rules in form-based codes that can not only facilitate form-based consensus, but also address issues of sustainability and response to the climatic urgencies.

In the realm of planning and design, especially in the United States and other western democracies, the landscape of local regulation cultures is more diverse and complex than it has ever been. In the last fifty years, we have witnessed substantive changes in the regulatory mechanisms that local governments use to plan, shape, and control urban development. The regulatory processes have become more complex, their scope has been widened, and more discretion has been employed in them. At the same time, issues and themes in social discourse have also changed. Constructs such as sustainability, participation, and place entered planning and design discourse. New expectations, such as responsiveness (the expectation for the design to respond to the particularities of the design context) and representativeness (the expectation for the design to incorporate concerns and interests of different groups) started to play significant roles in city halls, courts, and public media. New assumptions about what successful control mechanisms ought to be – regarding the appropriate form of controls, the desirable level of administrative discretion, and the reasonable scope of regulations – have emerged. Lately, more sophisticated form-based regulations have been crafted and zoning ordinances for entire cities are revisited and rewritten (as in Miami, Denver, and soon Los Angeles). In many jurisdictions, the linear progression of the endeavors of policymaking, crafting regulations, and design has left its place to overlaps, and the lines among policy, regulation, and design have become thinner, if not altogether disappeared.

These changes differ from community to community, especially in the United States, due to the decentralized nature of planning. While necessary, these changes brought new challenges. As the level of discretion increased, the abuse of it became a problem. As the level of participation increased, achieving effective communication in public meetings became a challenge.

To study the differences between various regulation cultures and understand the transformations that are happening within these cultures, this book suggests a framework that contrasts formal-technocratic and informal-dynamic legal models. These models help us to evaluate how formal and how informal is the regulation culture of any given city hall. Let us briefly define these models. The law, according to the formal-technocratic model, needs to work like a machine. The rules are specific, prescriptive, and gapless; as such, they are supposed to leave no room for interpretation or use of discretion. The reviewers are technocrats who are supposed to make decisions in a value-free application of rules to the cases. The decisions are usually dichotomous, that is, either “permitted” or “rejected.” According to informal-dynamic model, on the other hand, the reviewer interprets the rules, usually negotiates their meanings with the applicants, and makes decisions together with the applicants, and other actors if needed, in the political context of planning and design. Decisions are usually in the form of design solutions. As mentioned earlier, the rules within a formal-technocratic system are specific and prescriptive (twenty- feet setback, no more, no less). They are uniformly applicable (twenty-feet setback for all lots within a certain zone district). The rules in informal-dynamic systems, on the other hand, express the intention and leave room for interpretation. They are case-by-case evolved and situational (setback depends on neighboring setbacks and the sun orientation).

The traffic light regulating a junction, although extreme, is nevertheless a good example for the formal-technocratic model. It is a machine, which is value-neutral by definition, and it works according to predetermined mathematical formulas to produce dichotomous decisions of either “green: go” or “red: wait” (well, there is the yellow too, of course – the gray zone). The traffic officer controlling the junction, on the other hand, is an example for the use of discretion and judgment; the officer has the ability to react to the unique situations, such as an accident, and produce solutions on the spot. However, being a human, the officer cannot provide the levels of uniformity and impartiality the traffic light can offer.

The formal-technocratic and informal-dynamic models are idealized conceptual models. The reality usually is somewhere in between. Not only that, but the regulation cultures change over time as well: some are formalized (becoming more technocratic) and others are informalized (becoming more dynamic). When capitalist markets are introduced into many traditional urban environments, we usually observe the erosion of loose spaces and the process of thinning out, that is, spaces become more and more containers of only certain activities – the hustle and bustle in public realm disappears. These processes go hand in hand with an increase in formal territorial controls that regulate activities in the public realm. This can be characterized as a process of formalization. On the other hand, since the introduction of the first-generation zoning in the United States, a.k.a. Euclidian zoning, many communities observed a process of informalization in their regulation cultures. Processes that require use of more discretion, such as special reviews, have been introduced and more interpretation and designerly argumentation have been employed in regulatory procedures. Interactive review processes became commonplace in many communities as an alternative to by-right formal applications.

In some communities, the process of informalization caused a backlash. With the increased discretion and interpretation in the system, more abuses and behind-closed-doors deals have occurred and caused concerns and frustrations in the general public. Thus, planners pushed for simpler and more impartial processes. New York City’s abandoning of the bonus system in mid-1970s and simplifying the zoning system toward Euclidian zoning is an example of such backlash.

It is easy to recognize the forces that push for more formalization in legal systems: the search and craving for uniformity and impartiality in legal systems have been present throughout the human history. But what are the intellectual forces behind informalization? One of the arguments of this book is that in the realm of planning and design, especially starting with the 1960s, there have been important paradigmatic changes that pushed many communities to informalize their planning processes. To analyze these changes, we will use a framework introduced by Sancar (1994) that underlines constructs of sustainability, participation, and place. These paradigmatic changes underlined the previously mentioned two principles: responsiveness and representativeness. These two principles conflict with the principles of uniformity and impartiality. As will be discussed in more detail later, it is difficult to achieve responsiveness and representativeness in planning and design within formal-technocratic regulation cultures. Addressing the particularities of a location, whether environmental or social, necessitates discretion and communication in a regulatory system. This is why the first-generation zoning, designed to be a formal-technocratic system, did not satisfy many as the general expectations shifted toward the above-mentioned two criteria.

Addressing the abuse of discretionary power is one of the primary challenges in adopting informal regulatory tools. As a response, public participation may have a crucial role in achieving accountability and transparency. However, public participation presents its own challenges and does not in itself guarantee successful outcomes. How many times did we leave a public hearing confused and frustrated, deciding to have nothing to do with the city hall for the rest of our lives? “Too many times” would be the answer by most applicants, especially if the public hearing happens to be within an informal-dynamic regulation culture. Use of excessive jargon, lack of a common understanding of what the issues are, nonconstructive comments, politicians who are trying to avoid the key issues, and presentation of certain facts in a distorted way are usually among the factors that create frustration and prevent effective communication and thus hinder participation in decision-making, even though it is very much needed to provide accountability to the process.

This dilemma brings the issue of “effective communication” into the center of our discussion. What is effective communication? How do we know when the communication is effective and when it is distorted? This book uses Jurgen Habremas’ Universal Pragmatics as a conceptual framework to answer these questions (Habermas, 1979). Simply put, in the realm of language, there needs to be comprehension in order for someone to pay attention. However, Universal Pragmatics suggests that the language is not the only realm within which we realize effective communication. In addition, the speaker needs to be recognized as sincere by the listener to engender trust (psychological realm); the speaker needs to be perceived as a legitimate speaker to be acknowledged by the listener (social realm); and finally, what the speaker says needs to be perceived as truth so that listener can believe the speaker (realm of objective world). Unless all these conditions are met (comprehension, sincerity, legitimacy, and truth), effective communication cannot be achieved.

In many of the frustrating public meetings, there are usually some unnecessary (easily avoidable) and also some systemic distortions (imposed by larger scale political forces) (Forester, 1993). One of the primary arguments of this book is as follows: because urban form is at the center of many planning and design discussions, and because many issues can be comprehended better through where they are placed within the urban geography, designerly argumentation that is centered on urban form provides a unique opportunity in planning and design to eliminate distortions in communication. Here, we are no longer talking about just the verbal language, but also sophisticated techniques of graphic representation; not just the sincerity and legitimation of the speaker, but those of the graphic representation itself as well; not simply the truth created by verbal language and statistics, but the truth represented or created by a sophisticated language of urban form.

What do we mean by a sophisticated language of urban form? Where do we find it? This book’s answer is in the lot-types approach to form-based coding. Using some of the tools this books reviews and develops, it is possible to craft dynamic regulations that can provide clear vision and intent, and thus enable the parties to have a common understanding and to communicate effectively, which is an essential condition for successful participation.

When form-based coding is seen within this framework – in other words, when we place it within informal-dynamic legal systems with the responsibility to eliminate distortions in communication – certain principles surface as crucial. First, the codes need to include more dynamic rules than prescriptive ones. Second, the rules need to be perceived and crafted as tools. The rules are not forms themselves, nor should they be interpreted that way. They are for argumentation and resolution; they need to be crafted to create an effective language that communicates expectations about form-making and urban development. They work only when they are used properly, as part of communication where expectations are interpreted, comprehended, trusted, believed, negotiated, revised, and finally decided. It is with this understanding that this book will explore dynamic rule-making tools in form-based coding.

A lot-types approach to form-based coding focuses on deciphering the essential qualities of certain building archetypes and creating simple regulations that capture these essential qualities so that when these rules are applied, they can regenerate new built environments with same essential properties. Imagine a historic district with a unique and intricate urban fabric. Let us assume that because of a disaster such as an earthquake or fire, this district has been demolished. We need to rebuild it. If we were to focus on deciphering the archetypes to define the most valuable morphological characteristics of the district and create regulations that can capture these, we could then use these rules to rebuild not the same exact district, but a new one that reflects the same characteristics of the archetypes. This approach becomes especially handy when we try to understand, decipher, and regenerate those characteristics of the urban fabric that best respond to climatic conditions. Once we decipher successful responses and craft the rules, these responses can be regenerated at other places as well within the same climatic zones. Furthermore, as will be discussed in detail, since archetypes refer to a collective awareness of form, once their properties are decoded in the form of rules, these rules tend to provide clear vision and intent, and thus are accessible and accommodating for all parties.

The form-giving rules in many zoning codes today, except for some recent form-based codes, express forms that are suitable mostly in cold and temperate climates. The form characteristics of many hot–arid and hot–humid climate zones have not been explored. This is true especially in the United States, but also in many western countries where, for a century or so now, mechanical heating and cooling technologies have been widely used. One can find the same house built in Minnesota today in Arizona as well. We observe more or less the same newly built apartment buildings in hot–arid parts of touristic Mediterranean areas that we see in tropical resorts of, say, Mexico. With the increasing urgency due to global warming to create more resiliency in hot climate regions, and to decrease energy consumption in cooling buildings in these regions, now more than ever, we need to learn from the previous generations who built successful responses to climatic conditions at a time when today’s mechanical cooling technologies were not available. Chapter 10 of this book provides some inspiring examples of how this deciphering can be done in the form of crafting dynamic lot types, in particular for hot–arid and hot–humid climate zones. We hope that other volumes will follow this exploration.

This book reviews some of the recent exemplary form-based codes. But it mostly focuses on examples of author’s own professional practice. The emphasis is on the lot-types approach mostly at a scale that can be characterized as both “the mixed-use middle” (Elliott, 2008) and “missing middle housing” (Parolek, 2015). In other words, the book covers a scale that can be labeled as general urban (that is, mostly two- to three-, occasionally four- to five-story scale, predominantly residential mixed use urban environments with a floor area ratio between 0.6 and 2). This will exclude some other approaches focusing on other contexts such as urban center, suburban, or rural contexts, not because they are unimportant, but because they have been studied extensively by others (see, for instance, Parolek, Parolek, & Crawford, 2008). The lot types presented in this book should be seen as supplements to others’ work. Also, this book is not aiming at resolving all the challenges of dynamic legal systems (but increasing awareness of those), nor at creating a glossary of lot types that can comprehensively cover all climatic zones (but providing inspirational tools and examples demonstrating how these tools may be utilized). This book aims at opening doors to certain new avenues, the deeper explorations of which need to be left for the future volumes.

References

Elliott, D. L. (2008). A better way to zone: The principles to create more livable cities. Washington, DC, Colevo, CA, London, UK: The Island Press.

Forester, J. (1993). Critical theory, public policy, and planning practice: Toward a critical pragmatism. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Habermas, J. (1979). Communication and the evolution of society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Parolek, D., Parolek, K., & Crawford, P. C. (2008). Form-based codes: A guide for planners, urban designers, municipalities, and developers. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Parolek, D. (2015). ‘Missing Middle Housing’ website to fill the gap between supply and demand, Planetizen, retrieved from www.planetizen.com/node/75901. See also http://missingmiddlehousing.com/dev/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Missing-Middle-Housing-Responding-to-the-Demand-for-...