Crafting Form-Based Codes

Book excerpt: 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.