Finding The Right Form
Responsive Concepts & Form Based Planning
Form does not follow function — it follows other forms. The existing forms (the “context”) are the place to start the search for new forms that are the subject of planning and urban design. The elements of city form, the places, vary in each city — streets, plazas, places, parks, roads, patterns, grids, edges, and so on. Only by understanding and responding to these forms can we truly minimize harmful impositions and create helpful change.
The land does not care much about what “land uses” occupy the form of the city – it is the physicality or form of those uses that matters the most. This attitude underlies the argument for form-based codes. Form-based codes can be the most responsive to communities, and least invasive on the land, because they deal directly with the need to respect the land, its history and its future.
Form-based planning has been present for centuries. Form-based zoning-codes are just one administrative method for responding to a city’s context and places. Form-based planning and place making does not always require a code. How planners apply form-based planning and design depends on local administrative and development practices. Form-based solutions can be embedded in many types of maps, regulatory frameworks, contracts, utility systems, transportation policies and similar instruments of local government.
Many writers have compiled different languages of city form and inferred larger models explaining community form. The models can be thought of as ranging from purely descriptive studies to highly prescriptive approaches that offer recommendations as to what city forms should be created in the future. The descriptive models of city form help us understand the components that we need to pull together. Planning, however, must be prescriptive, going beyond just putting the pieces together, to create better communities. The proposed forms must suit day-to-day utilitarian needs as well as achieve larger cultural goals. Over time, the city evolves as an ever-changing collective craft.
Theories and models of responsive city form vary significantly in the degree to which they actually depict forms. Some critics actually write about forms without showing graphic images. The inclusion or absence of illustrations of form becomes most relevant when the abstract ideas require concretization — when planners must progress from understanding city forms to making new ones. The words describing forms can, in fact, represent an almost infinite variety of real places.
The words “main street” conjures many thousands of possible images of form whose essential character, or gestalt, is perhaps a singular idea. That is, the words “main street” may be worth a thousand pictures because the words are so general. In some plans, proposing highly generalize textual concepts is helpful and can be further concretized by defining patterns or types of mains streets such as:
Traditional main street
Small rural main street
Suburban main street
Inner ring main street
Neighborhood main street
Entertainment main street
More detailed verbal descriptions, combined with concrete imagery. help an audience understand critical issues that might otherwise go unnoticed such as: architectural character, social experience, economic value, and so forth.
The search for useful models, concepts, and theories must be a search for responsiveness. We should search for ideas that help us reflect upon, and then respond positively to, existing communities rather than use non-responsive physical forms that damage cities. Some models are intentionally non-responsive in order to impose new ideologies on the land advocated by planners. Such models are based on the presumption that the forms and places on the land — both the built and natural environments — are offensive to our communities, that the existing community is somehow at fault for creating the “wrong” city. Recognizing valid responsive, as well as non-responsive concepts, takes practice, an open mind, and the willingness to accept the complexity, uncertainty and unknowable nature of our communities.
Well respected, everyday model of waterfront activity. Lucerne, 1976.
Models That Help Induce Form
There are many ways to search and find good decision-making models for creating urban form. The list offered below is my subjective collection of models with strong practical value. These models are useful to designers when determining which forms are well suited to different places and contexts. The models form a toolbox, with each tool appropriate for a different circumstance. These concepts create a collage of decision-making techniques, rules-of-thumb, and heuristic devices to find good solutions quickly. Moreover, these problem-solving concepts can be used repeatedly and, in most cases, can be explained in ordinary language to audiences of leaders, other experts, and the general public. These concepts are listed in the order in which I gained some understanding of how they can be used:
Camillo Sitte described city form long before empirical investigations of form became commonplace. His work represents the best precursor to our current needs. His evaluations were specific, contextualized research, not claiming to go beyond the limits in which they were geographically bounded but, at the same time, offering useful principles — just as useful today as when he wrote them over 100 years ago. Additionally, some of his insights into traffic, streetscape and property development demonstrate that many of our urban design problems started before the professional popularity of modernism in architecture and the public’s preference for automobiles.
Jane Jacobs (in Death and Life of Great American Cities), depicts relatively few specific forms, but still offers one of the most lasting empirical models of how the imposition of forms on the land has failed and succeeded. Her prescriptions of what should work, and what does not work (and why) still provide one of the best systematic set of warnings to planners who believe they have the best answers. Her insights into urban neighborhoods, and the degree to which they are not a collection of geographically independent “villages,” remains a valid description of our urban geography which has still not been translated effectively into maps.
Lynch’s simple model (Image of the City) – paths, edges, nodes, district, and landmarks – is enormously useful as a basic analytic device because the general public understands his concepts easily. Planners can present an analysis of the community using these concepts and, in response, a lay audience will readily understand how to appreciate the concept. His more detailed text — Good City Form — provides a more academic view for planners looking for a more intellectually precise analysis.
Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter (in Collage City) provide intellectual frameworks with the most complex, but clearly insightful, cultural and historical view of city form. In places it may be difficult to understand, but it is the most valid intellectual description of contemporary city form and how it evolved. More importantly for planners, many of the concepts (such as the chapters entitled Collision City and The Crisis of Object, the Predicament of Texture) offer extremely practical approaches to decision making when searching for the right form for specific places. Their approach rejects the interpretation of form apart from the context of culture, history, and ideas which created that form. While hard to explain to the general public, their approach seems the most credible – especially if we were to view the intellectual ecology of city form as the proper foundation for decision making.
Christopher Alexander (A Pattern language) delivers a detailed dictionary of concepts that can be used as a stand-alone decision tool to search for the right form. Even more important are the principles he uses to establish patterns, using text, photographs, diagrams of form, and detailed examples. For me, the best principle is his expression of confidence in the solution — a rare admission that the validity of design ideas must be subjective. To some extent regional and local history and culture are integrated with each pattern. Transferability of the patterns requires careful customization to new areas with different conditions.
Allan Jacobs (Great Streets) and the companion The Boulevard Book (by Jacobs, Elizabeth MacDonald and Yodan Rofe) contain many answers in the form of precise measurements that define the forms of some of our greatest public places. As someone who grew up visiting Olmsted’s Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn I have always remembered it as a perfect place but, until this book, I did not know its precise dimensions. Today, of course, we can measure the dimensions online, but you still cannot understand their full significance and why they work unless you read this book.
The City Beautiful movement, espoused in many books by many authors, includes clear visionary concepts that are also practical and feasible. The American Vitruvius: An Architect's Handbook Of Civic Art (by Werner Hegemann and Elbert Peets) as well as the Plan of Chicago (by Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett) provide a good collection of ideas and insights into the value of monumental and grandiose visions. While many people interpret the City Beautiful movement solely as an arrogant ideology, it is also a set of meaningful design concepts which captured the support of political leaders across the country. When used in a less grandiose way, the principles of the City Beautiful movement can provide effective solutions.
Spiro Kostof (The City Shaped) offers the largest framework for classifying city forms into simple patterns of grids, organic, and symbolic systems. He adds other, less prevalent, models such as cities based on diagrams and principles of classicism. Most valuable is his analyses of multiple grid systems and multiple organic systems. He also shows numerous examples of how city form evolves in a way that often vacillates between organic and grid like models over time to produce the rich texture and unique character evidenced in many cities.
The Charter of the Congress for the New Urbanism, along with publications and studies by its proponents have engrained themselves into contemporary planning practices in a relatively short time span. Many architects dismiss New Urbanism as overly historical or classical. Yet new urbanism has been embraced by the public as the right approach to city form because it resonates politically and culturally — not just with designers but government officials and property developers. Cultural recognition of new urbanist principles fits many of our places effectively. Many planners, unfortunately, do not use the principles as tools for decision-making but rather as designs to be copied without any customization to different contexts or places. A quick study of form-based codes, as popularized by New Urbanism, shows how the principles can be tailored uniquely to different types of places.
Other planners and designers will, undoubtedly, find other intellectual tools that lead to the right forms. The point is that crafting solutions requires multiple tools at different times in the process. Used the wrong way these tools can cause harm more than they can help. The tools we use at the start of the search for the right forms will not be the same as the tools we use at a different point in that process. There is no “best” tool — just the right tool at the right time. As always, effective use of tools requires skill and talent.
The ideas in these conceptual approaches to city form rarely support demolition of the built or natural environments. Too often planners suggest demolition for the wrong reasons — political expediency, lack of design skill, or simply repetition of the mistakes of others. The ideas listed above, as well as many comparable writings, can help create new environments that are responsive to a community and represent the types of decision-making aids planners should use. Today, it is easy for individuals to post less thoughtful content online where they simply represent the same concepts with an updated vocabulary — sometimes academic and sometimes practical. It is the responsibility of good planners and designers to help filter new presentations of old ideas and ensure that the right decision-making principles are applied.
These two hand drawn maps, from students in urban design at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, depict the pattern of form for the same area near downtown. The 1910 map shows a coherent city in which new forms can prosper. Instead, by 1996, a series of invasive forms based on anti-urban ideologies destroyed much of the city fabric. Milwaukee, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, 1990s.
Managing Invasive And Insurgent Forms
The word “invasive” is found in divergent disciplines including ecology, medicine, and politics. While the specific professional meanings vary in each of these disciplines, invasiveness is always considered as something potentially harmful to its context. For urban planners, “invasiveness” in the natural environment is a familiar concept. However, in the built environment, the concept of “invasiveness” has not yet become a customary view of the way some of our cities and places may be harmed. Planners do not wage campaigns against invasive forms of buildings that can destroy the character of a community. Many of our pedestrian friendly streets were taken over, dominated, and destroyed, by invasive new forms. Urban renewal and gentrification also represent invasive acts to the built environment. In other disciplines (medicine, ecology, politics) when invasive acts occur we usually want to find ways to stop them in the future and mitigate harm in the present. The planning professions has delayed too long in addressing these issues. At the very least we need to recognize invasive and insurgent forms, identify the potential harm, and mitigate that potential as soon as possible.
San Antonio’s riverwalk is an internationally recognized asset. Did it “invade” the ground, expanding the activity below the surface of the city? Did it increase or diminish activity at “street” level? San Antonio, 2000s.
It might be useful to talk about balancing systems or about reaching a long-term equilibrium in an ecological system of built and natural environments. Ecologists of the natural environment look at the past history of the system. They ask questions about how the plants and animals helped or harm each other and how they fit together. The same question needs to be asked about the built forms of our cities. Instead, planners often want to undertake a wholesale replacement of places, usually accompanied by an argument that says we should not look at anything old, but only at something new. This is tantamount to telling the land on which communities evolve that whatever came before was wrong, did not work, and we must dominate the land with something entirely different. This is not a land-friendly attitude nor one that sees planning as an incremental, evolutionary process.
Insurgence of the land: it seems like the ground erupted and pushed townhomes upward to make a parking structure. Chicago, 1970s.
Just as the term “invasive” presupposes a negative moral behavior, so too “insurgent” can be seen the same way. “Insurgency” means that the impetus for major change comes from inside, not outside, a community. An insurgent plan comes from within the community and seeks to make major changes that may involve eradicating a series of places. This is most commonplace when major institutions within a community (like a large institutional campus or business district) wish to expand dramatically. Just like invasive built forms from outside the community can be considered harmful, so too can a dramatic, oversized extension – or insurgence — of a particular set of forms or places from within the community.
Addressing an insurgency in built form requires a balanced, managed approach. Not an impulsive response for or against the changes. An insurgent pattern, unlike an invasive pattern of form, is already present in a community. An expansion of such forms must be respected, allowed in part, but restrained from dominating the surrounding area. Any planner who has managed the local expansion of a large college campus understands the complexity and nuances of such change.
The problem with arguments about “invasive” and “insurgent” actions is that we immediately attach moral characteristics to such actions. A new building form is never morally correct or incorrect because it does not match a community’s internal traditions or represent a concept from another place and time. Proponents and opponents simply borrow this language as a way to oversimplify relatively complex issues. Each circumstance needs to be evaluated independently and not prejudged.
Avoid Utopian Forms — Celebrating Cities
Along with concepts of “invasive” or “insurgent” plans we can add the analogous idea of “utopian” plans. Utopian concepts can be equally harmful or beneficial. Many planners resort to describing utopian ideas because they promise an ideal city. Planners use this argument to convince local authorities to follow a new theory. It makes sense for planners to interpret and customize the ideas, rather than use them as a perfect solution for a specific place. So-called new towns often become laboratories for utopian plans and the consequences vary considerably. When adopted in an overly rigid way, most utopian plans fail. Utopian concepts can be beneficial when they are tailored to each place individually. Here are some examples and lessons learned:
Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City of Tomorrow is often described as a utopian concept focused on social and economic ideas. From my perspective the major failure of this utopia concerns the physical forms it promoted inadvertently. Some see the geometry of Howard’s diagrams as simply a device for describing the social and economic organization. The diagrams, however, also imply that a highly prescriptive pattern of land use, regardless of consequences should be applied. The physical form proposes discrimination, advocates dysfunctional segregation of activities, lacks rational order, and entrenches class distinctions that presumably Howard was trying to avoid. His concentric rings became a hallmark for planners to emulate because they depicted an overly simplistic diagram that was easy to remember and replicate. It described the city, not in terms of form, but in terms of abstract social categories, most of which were completely independent of the land. Some of his social ideas may have been well-intended at the time. His planning diagrams, however, continue to preclude effective planning in practice.
The utopias of Frank Lloyd Wright (Broadacre City) and Le Corbusier (Ville Radieuse) differed dramatically in their form but were equally harmful. Both mandated non-responsive systems of urban development. Corbusier’s model might be described as profoundly invasive. Wright’s Broadacre City, emerging from Jefferson’s grid, is completely insurgent. Both seemed to impose a moral agenda on the occupants of the city, carrying to extremes a specific ideology. At the same time, their architectural achievements produced beautiful, memorable paradigms of built form which should occupy a special place in our cities — just not as a tool for planning and decision making.
A possible exception is Corbusier’s plan for Chandigarh (from the 1950s) which created a different conceptualization of city form. In Chandigarh, the rigidity of the grid disappeared as did the insistence on the detailed form of the architecture. In fact, the plan is remarkably similar conceptually to some of the more ancient cities that used grids to form a series of quarters or sections with the internal organization of each subarea left to local incremental development over time. In some ways Chandigarh is a model of how a non-utopian plan can implant utopian ideas.
Corbusier’s Unite Habitacion in Marseilles was intended as a first step in a utopian model. The architectural beauty of the building, the stunning views, and the lively rooftop contrast starkly with the form of the city below. It has become destination architecture but not a utopian city. Marseilles, 1967.
Other utopian models which were applied less relentlessly and with a more humanistic touch include the New Deal Greenbelt communities spearheaded by Rexford Tugwell for the Resettlement Administration during the Great Depression. These new towns were based on utopian concepts but were implemented pragmatically. Greendale Wisconsin, one the three towns that were built, made a successful transition from one context to another. Initially all the housing units were owned by the federal government and the town was surrounded by rural farms. Over the decades the housing units were converted to owner-occupied residences and the context changed from rural to suburban. This demonstrates how utopian concepts, based on ordinary forms, and administered in a responsive manner, can succeed as a planned community.
Another utopian concept — Tony Garnier’s Cite Industrielle — was never built as a community but many of the individual concepts were implanted in other communities. His concepts included small scale single family residential blocks with walking paths, integration of an historic town center, inclusion of hydroelectric power, a separated industrial district (predating Ford’s River Rouge plan), mass transit, a local airport, distributed public services and, most intriguingly, new structural concepts for cast-in-place concrete. Unlike the social and physical straight-jackets of Howard, Wright and Corbusier, Garnier’s utopia was both pragmatic and socially diverse.
The underlying premise for top-down dogmatic utopian cities is that existing city forms are 100% wrong — not just parts of the city or some of its attributes, but the entire urban system. I cannot imagine an ecologist of natural environments proposing that an entire ecological system Is “wrong” and must be replaced. Those new towns that assumed that all prior planned communities were “wrong” did not last. Conversely, new towns that began with a singular vision but, as they evolved, admitted diversity of form and social activities were far more successful. Yet planners continue to adopt a dictatorial approach to applying new concepts without adjustment to circumstances. Sometimes this dogmatism is no more than a convenient way to gain recognition, support an economic agenda, or to adopt a position for the sake of political gain.
Top-down utopias are also consistent with a misguided long-standing tradition in America that cities are inherently bad places and must be replaced. This tradition began with Jefferson and his colleagues. This cultural bias against cities is well documented in The Intellectual Versus The City by Morton and Lucia White. The White’s brief compendium of the cultural biases against cities should not come as a surprise. This bias runs through almost all of our cultural development — there are many examples in both the arts and the sciences. Instead of celebrating cities as an incredible human achievement they can be used as scapegoats by people seeking recognition. When something goes wrong blame the city. Planners must contend with this behavior continuously.
Ordinary Versus Extraordinary Forms
In Song of Myself (1892) Walt Whitman wrote:
This is the city and I am one of the citizens,
Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets, newspapers, schools,
The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories, stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate.
These words imply a devotion to the ordinary city filled with everyday life. Ordinary, everyday forms, when collected, become the foundation for extraordinary cities. Rowhouses in many older cities are quite ordinary but contribute to the texture and grain of highly desirable neighborhoods. Form-based codes encourage appealing, but ordinary designs. Ordinary forms do not mean that all the buildings are identical, just that they fit into a continuous pattern. The buildings that fit form-based codes may all vary somewhat, but the variations are within the vernacular of local forms.
For the commercial home-building industry, keeping the architecture ordinary does not present a challenge. For planners, however, maintaining a familiar pattern of urban form can be problematic if clients (including community leaders or major property developers) want their buildings to stand out from the rest. The best planners, developers, and architects find ways to create a unique style, but still organize the forms into a pattern of ordinary city forms. Good examples can be seen in newer as well as centuries-old neighborhoods — the forms fit in, but the style stands out.
The problem for urban designers is making ordinary places more meaningful. Should ordinary forms be the work of architectural designers? John Ruskin (in the Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849) pointed out (from an elitist viewpoint) that architects should not deal with everyday buildings like houses and shops but only with culturally significant buildings like palaces and cathedrals — the extraordinary forms in our communities. Centuries later the Bauhaus championed the opposite view that everything was “designed”, especially the ordinary components of everyday life — from small houses to factories and spoons.
At the other end of the continuum from ordinary forms and places, some communities want to become extraordinary — to become a destination that others want to see. Retailers know that they make more money if their place becomes a destination. Las Vegas and Disney are not the only destinations. The concept of a destination place is much more subtle. It is a place one chooses to visit but not by necessity. Sometimes this becomes described as a “lifestyle” choice, or the destination is a special district for arts or entertainment. Some destinations, like the Wisconsin Dells, evolved incrementally while places like Disneyland are built rapidly.
At one time destinations might have been places of pilgrimage like Mont Saint Michel. The idea of going on a pilgrimage to a holy place may, in a spiritual way, seem analogous to visiting the Rocky Mountains, the Galapagos Islands, or a world heritage site designated by the United Nations. The Michelin guides dub destinations as “worth a trip.” All of these places are extraordinary. Planning for ordinary and extraordinary places requires careful evaluation of existing conditions, opportunities and culture. Great communities, of course, have both ordinary and extraordinary forms hopefully proportionate to their size and cultural significance.
Planning For Extraordinary Forms
A related issue to categorizing patterns of form, from ordinary to extraordinary, suggests that major public plazas necessitate three types of building forms (and associated places):
Major civic buildings: landmarks or extraordinary forms at a focal point in a major plaza or along street
Contributing buildings: forms that define the edges of a plaza or street creating an entourage for the more prominent civic buildings
Background buildings: ordinary forms comprising the “background” texture and grain of the neighborhood or district surrounding the extraordinary forms
Planners often prefer an extraordinary building to be located in the center of a plaza. When this happens the plaza itself loses prominence and actually diminishes the corresponding value of the buildings as a landmark. To avoid this error, one of Camillo Sitte’s major principles (1889) states “That The Center of Plazas Be Kept Free.” His empirical research and careful recording of 160 plazas across Europe clearly proved his thesis. In fact, many of the landmark buildings (usually churches) which he recorded abutted other buildings along the edge of a plaza, sometimes on as many three sides with just the front facade serving as the extraordinary form.
Today, making an extraordinary building form may be too easy. It seems that each architect and client wants their building to stand out as something special. This is achieved by ensuring that there is no harmony with the surroundings and that the building is perceived as a separate object surrounded by open space or at best in stark contrast to its architectural context. Large open spaces create discontinuity, often made more objectionable by use as a parking area or an unoccupied, unadorned lawn. In this way the new building is disconnected from the context. In denser urban areas, however, such disconnection prevents the building from being ordinary (but does not impart added value). In suburban areas so many buildings are disconnected that an overall incoherent townscape precludes any sense of the ordinary or the extraordinary — the forms are simply unrelated.
The Karl-Marx-Hof was designed by Karl Ehn in the 1920s and opened in 1930. It combines a unique mixture of ordinary and extraordinary forms, with 1400 residential units in one structure. The building is monumental in length (over 3500 feet), integrated with places that fit the context rather well (upper right photo looking out), and still configured to fit to the city street system (lower left aerial from Google Earth). Vienna, 1976 and Google Earth 2022.
Explaining The Form
For planning, everything in our built environment is designed, whether it is an unself-conscious vernacular design or elite self-conscious design. Collectively both ordinary and extraordinary forms make the menu used to create urban forms. Planners need to consider the design process for both ordinary and extraordinary places which, in turn, requires very different modes of decision making, design, and public discourse.
Many new buildings, whose designers seek recognition for their buildings as extraordinary, often get erected along with explanations of their importance. Architects and building owners craft narratives of symbolism, history, purpose or personal expression. The general public may find these narratives interesting and the subject of discussion in the short term. From the standpoint of long term planning these narratives lose relevance quickly as new observers, who have not been told the meaning of the architecture, lose interest. Do cities need commentators to tell us why a building is beautiful or worth more than its property value? Tom Wolfe’s Painted Word made the case that some of our contemporary art in the mid-twentieth century was produced not just by artists but by the critics who explained the aesthetic value of the work.
Do urban plans and designs require some explanation in order to be appreciated? The short-term answer is “yes,” but first the question needs to be rephrased as “what type of explanation is needed?” Planners have a social obligation to explain the rationale for their work. The rationale for ordinary and extraordinary forms will vary. Some architects of extraordinary buildings use an almost-secret language to self-rationalize for their work or at best use language not yet appreciated by their audience. Planners, working for the public, need to use common language, everyday experiences, and well understood local concepts that make their decisions more coherent — even when conflicts will arise.
Topic summary
Responsive concepts & form based planning
Models that help induce forms
Managing invasive and insurgent forms
Avoid utopian forms — celebrating cities
Ordinary versus extraordinary forms
Planning for extraordinary forms
Explaining the form