Urban Coding and Planning

Urban codes have a profound influence on urban form, affecting the design and placement of buildings, streets and public spaces. Historically, their use has helped create some of our best-loved urban environments, while recent advances in coding have been a growing focus of attention, particularly in Britain and North America. However, the full potential for the role of codes has yet to be realized.

In Urban Coding and Planning, Stephen Marshall and his contributors investigate the nature and scope of coding; its purposes; the kinds of environments it creates; and, perhaps most importantly, its relationship to urban planning.

By bringing together historical and ongoing traditions of coding from around the world – with chapters describing examples from the United Kingdom, France, India, China, Japan, Australia, South Africa, the United States and Latin America – this book provides lessons for today’s theory and practice of place-making.

Stephen Marshall is Senior Lecturer at the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL. He has 20 years’ experience in transport, planning and urban design – five years in consultancy and fifteen in academia. This experience includes work on several EC and UK research council projects, as well as research for UK and Scottish government level projects and work for local authorities and private clients in Scotland and London. He is currently director of the PhD programme at the Bartlett School of Planning, where he also teaches on urban design, urban form and transport courses. Dr Marshall’s principal research interests are in urban form and urban structure, and how these relate to urban design and planning. This interest encompasses topics such as streets and transport networks; urban morphology and evolution; and the use of codes for generating urban structure. Dr Marshall is Chair of the Editorial Board of Urban Design and Planning, part of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers journal series, and an editorial board member for Built Environment journal. His books include Streets and Patterns (2005), Land Use and Transport (edited with David Banister, 2007) and Cities Design and Evolution (2009).

1. Introduction Stephen Marshall 2. A Chronicle of Urban Codes in Pre-Industrial London’s Streets and Squares Nick Green 3. The Controlling Urban Code of Enlightenment Scotland Charles K. McKean 4. The Ideal and the Real: Urban Codes in the Spanish-American Lettered City Jean-François Lejeune 5. Paradigms for Design: the Vastu Vidya Codes of India Vibhuti Sachdev 6. Prescribing the Ideal City: Building Codes and Planning Principles in Beijing Qinghua Guo 7. Machizukuri and Urban Codes in Historical and Contemporary Kyoto Yoshihiko Baba 8. Adelaide’s Urban Design: Pendular Swings in Concepts and Codes Barrie Shelton 9. Coding in the French Planning System: From Building Line to Morphological Zoning Karl Kropf 10. Coding as ‘Bottom-Up’ Planning: Developing a New African Urbanism Gerald Steyn 11. How Codes Shaped Development in the United States, and Why They Should Be Changed Jonathan Barnett 12. Conclusions Stephen Marshall