#form-based code

Buffalo greens up with new form-based land use and zoning codes

(Courtesy Andrew Nash / Flickr)

Some claim that the city of Buffalo, New York, was not named for the large plains mammal but for the beau fleuve, the beautiful Niagara River, that empties into Lake Erie near the city. Regardless of whether this story is true or apocryphal, it’s undeniable that Buffalo is reprising its environmental heritage with the Green Code, a comprehensive update to the…

Logan District blossoms as stage set for Matilda Building, a 57-unit mixed use project

The Matilda Building will rise on the Hamilton Corridor in the Logan District, with 57 apartment units and first-floor retail. Urban design abound. (PHOTO: Spokane Permits) In May, we reported on a major new mixed-use project set for construction on North Hamilton in the burgeoning Logan District. At that point, the “Hamilton Project” had just applied for a SEPA Review, the penultimate step in…

Preliminary drawings from Spokane’s permitting website indicate that the mixed-use building at 1002 N Hamilton will include streetfront retail with apartments above. (PHOTO: spokanepermits.org)

We tend not to post on Spokane Rising about projects that have not yet been announced publicly, but this one just happened to catch our eye on the City of Spokane’s Citizen Access permitting website. We…

Kenji Ekuan print via Frieze

So I agree that architects and New Urbanist/Old Modernist urban planners are too entranced by the idea of finding the perfect form or form-based code that can lead to utopia. But color me with the Darkly Skeptical crayon that anti-trust laws and tax codes are the way to economic prosperity. The use of South and North Korea in any "see American-style capitalist democracy works" argument sends up real flags. Do economists just assign causation to all examples of correlation and do they never read political historians?

Can Importing Well-Run Cities Into Poorly Run Countries Lift The World From Poverty?

That’s what Paul Romer thinks. His idea of charter cities--autonomous, technocratic economic hubs* based on the model of Hong Kong--that would be founded in developing nations is revolutionary. But would it work?

Romer’s biggest idea is the importance of “rules.” Rules are, he, believes, the core DNA of any successful city--not sidewalks, not small blocks, not the width or layout of city streets. New ideas don’t need old buildings; they need strong patent and bankruptcy laws. Good rules explain why Nogales, Ariz., is roughly three times as rich as its sister city across the Mexican border. Instead of over-thinking urban form through rigid codes and top-down planning--the approach favored by modernists and New Urbanists alike--Romer and his partners refuse to plan at all, preferring to search for a minimum set of rules from which order can emerge.

 In the absence of good rules, he points out, “when you teach a man to fish, you destroy an aquatic ecosystem.” Laws and institutions turn out to influence growth as much as innovation--and without them, the latter doesn’t happen. How else to explain the stark divergence of North and South Korea? Before the war, the North was the more technologically advanced of the two.

Now--and this is where Romer diverges from his peers--if rules are ideas, and ideas can freely be shared, then tax codes, anti-trust laws and independent judges should be shareable as well. And if cities are the places where new ideas take root and grow to scale, well, we should be building more Hong Kongs--and we should be able to build them anywhere. By transplanting rules from well-run nations to poorly governed ones, we can close the development gap between them, just as China has done. That, in a nutshell, is the rationale for charter cities.