The Transect

The New Urban Transect describes the range of natural and built environments from the heart of the wilderness to the center of the city. The diagrams for the Transect (here and here) show these as Transect Zones: each urban T-zone is a neighborhood with most or many of the needs and activities of daily life within a short five-to-ten minute walk. The Transect reflects the New Urban reaction to the sub-urban way we've been building for the last 50 years, a way of building that not only requires that everyone drive everywhere for virtually everything, but that usually creates non-places where no one wants to walk even if they can. In this sub-urban world, only nature (T-1 and T-2) is worthy of our attention — everywhere else we retreat to our houses, cars and backyards.

T-zones have implications for architectural and urban form not so different from the old New York maxim for clothes, “Don’t wear brown in town.” A tower appropriate for Wall Street in Manhattan doesn't fit on the green in Woodstock, Vermont. A wood frame Greek Revival house with a lawn behind a white picket fence doesn’t work on the plaza at Rockefeller Center. The fence is different on Wall Street than in Woodstock: so are the sidewalk, the streetlamp on the sidewalk and the size of the setback from the street. And none of them are appropriate in the middle of the Yellowstone Valley or the wilds of Alaska.

This may all seem obvious, but it is not the way architects, planners, builders and developers have worked for the last half-century. So the Transect and the T-zones are the basis for Smart Codes, which are tools for making better places. Smart Codes reject the fetishized objects of Starchitecture as the goal of building, and replace the system of Zoning that produced American sprawl by zoning virtually everywhere — from city to country — for the same low-density, single-use, auto-dependent zones. The system in which McDonald’s and CVS thought one building type, with the parking out front and the drive-thru on the side, fit all.

When people first learn about the Transect, they often think it means every every urban transect is supposed to have one continuous gradient, like the diagram. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I've posted a new photo album with pictures from recent trips to South Kensington, in London. Walking around South Kensington brought home to me how much of the power and beauty of cities can come from contrasts in their individual transects. Because of Modernism's emphasis on creativity and the individual building we tend to focus on creating variety between buildings and in each building. Traditional cities show us that creating variety from street to street and block to block can often create a better and more pleasing public realm, with streets that make us want to walk.

Part of what makes Fifth Avenue great is the consistency of the urbanism on the east side of the street opposed to the naturalism of the great park across the street. And while some think the best New York urbanism is in the jumble of grids in Greenwich Village, it's also in the places where Manhattan's regular, boring grid is sufficiently interrupted: by Bryant Park, by Central Park, by Park Avenue and by the rivers. An essential quality of the cross streets on the Upper East Side is that they have Central Park on one end, the East River on the other, and the extra avenues in between that make smaller,more pleasant blocks.

What would Paris be like without the great 18^th and 19^th century boulevards that cut through the medieval quarters? Not as efficient, beautiful and urbane as it is. For a large city, Paris has unusually consistent buildings: most are built from the same stone, and the building heights and facades are highly regulated, right down to the details of which floors will have balconies and how far those balconies will protrude from the face of the building.

Paris is a beautiful Classical city, and no one comes back from Paris saying, Oh it was so boring, all the buildings are the same! That's partly because Parisians understand Classical beauty and the principles of repetition, and partly because of the varieties in adjacent streets. This variety in the Transect is wonderful for the walker.

South Kensington is a 19th century section of London that's best known for its "terraces" of tall white Classical and Victorian Classical houses. But these are cheek by jowl with large apartment blocks on the wider streets and with 2 story rowhouses and freestanding single family houses. Behind the terraces are mews with small garages and flats that now cost £1 million.

I didn't really know the area until I found an apartment hotel there owned by Citadines, a French company that runs apartment hotels around Europe with small kitchens in every room and conveniences like laundry rooms in the basement. Hotels.com had an excellent rate, and I ended up staying there 3 times, for a total of almost 3 weeks.

Right in the building and across the street was a thriving neighborhood center, with one of the best small groceries in London, two good cafes, three pubs, two Indian restaurants and several other stores, including a good newstore (essential for me in England). A quarter of a mile away is an enormous 24–hour Sainsbury's supermarket, with, I discovered, excellent frozen organic Indian meals.

Between the hotel and the Sainsbury's were several routes for very nice walks. I've documented one of them in the photo album and will annotate it over this weekend. After the photos of the walk are other pictures of the neighborhood.