City Rules: How Regulations Affect Urban Form

by Emily Talen

City Rules offers a challenge to students and professionals in urban planning, design, and policy to change the rules of city-building, using regulations to reinvigorate, rather than stifle, our communities. Emily Talen demonstrates that regulations are a primary detriment to the creation of a desirable urban form. While many contemporary codes encourage sprawl and even urban blight, that hasn't always been the case-and it shouldn't be in the future. 
 
Talen provides a visually rich history, showing how certain eras used rules to produce beautiful, walkable, and sustainable communities, while others created just the opposite. She makes complex regulations understandable, demystifying city rules like zoning and illustrating how written codes translate into real-world consequences. Most importantly, Talen proposes changes to these rules that will actually enhance communities' freedom to develop unique spaces.

Genres: Urban Planning, Nonfiction, Urban, Urbanism, Cities

256 pages, Hardcover

First published December 16, 2011

Reviews

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

In part, this fine book states the obvious: that automobile-dependent suburbia is the result of municipal codes. But what Talen does that many other authors have not done is to show, using a wide variety of examples, that these codes have in fact become more stringently auto-oriented, and more complex, over time. For example, minimum lot sizes in 1920s zoning codes were typically around 1/10 to 1/20 of an acre; by contrast, suburbs today may require one- and two-acre lots.

In addition, Talen addresses details overlooked by other authors; while many commentators have discussed the impact of single-use zoning and density restrictions, Talen discusses more technical issues such as curb radii and makes them comprehensible. (Basically, a curb radius is a measure of how hard it is to make a turn; where streets are at right angles, curb radii are low, and drivers must drive more slowly to make turns).

Talen also shows how zoning often creates incoherent results, by combining complex regulation with lack of vision. For example, Herbert Hoover's 1920s zoning commission endorsed both separation of residential from commercial land uses and the idea of people being able to walk to work- but because the commission did not limit the size of homeowner-only zones, zoning created unwalkable suburbs.

Similarly, Phoenix's zoning seeks to separate uses, but allows a gas station next to a single-family house rather than buffering houses with less traffic-producing uses- a situation that gives people all the congestion of urbanity combined with the car dependence of sprawl.

[Matthew Palagyi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think Talen does get to the right ideas of what codes should do - be adaptable to the future, resemble some public consensual goal. Her suggestions of Form based code seemed pretty strict though and didn’t have much data determining whether or not it achieved the ideas mentioned above.

Overall, the book is successful in painting the picture of what codes and rules have done in American cities and leads to good conversations about what should exist instead. The solutions, however, I feel are found in theory and a reflection of planning as a profession and not in more codes.

[Chris D'Antonio · Rating 3 out of 5]

This merits a more thorough analysis, but it was a neat overview of the history of Zoning and proto-zoning regulations, a good overview of the challenges present in crafting a zoning code and keeping it current and vital. Much of the conclusion and discussion simply focused on new urbanism and improving the pedestrian realm and what is being done to adapt codes to accomplish that.

[Ashley Clubb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agree with her points about design impacting urban form, but I think culture and the political undergirding is what actually shapes the built

[Tony Crispin · Rating 5 out of 5]

i liked this book bc i agreed with everything it said before I read it and I like affirmation

[Deidre · Rating 3 out of 5]

How do planning rules form the character of a city? Emily Talen takes a comprehensive look at city planning in City Rules, a new book from Island Press. The planning rules serve as a guideline, providing a framework for urban development but it is often the ways that the rules are determined that makes the difference.

Urban planning is necessary for public health and safety but we exist in cities and towns giving little thought to how they were organized. American zoning ordinances were introduced in the 1920s and focused on district-centered building guidelines. Things are far different than they were then and many of today's cities are suffering under the weight of rules and regulations created for another era. Full review on Yahoo.com

[Stuart · Rating 3 out of 5]

A tedious read at times but essential if you want to understand the background behind today's dysfunctional zoning laws.

[Andrey Grechushchev]

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