Rural-Urban Transect

The Transect guides more New Urbanist planning than any other construct. It was first developed over a century ago for the analysis and management of natural environments.

Douglas Duany walked with his brother Andres, a founder of the New Urbanism, into the South Beach waves in the 1990s, highlighting the different sets of rules in each of the physical contexts and the creatures that inhabited each as they walked from surf to sandy beach to the dunes to Lummus Park.

And then Douglas asked the question: "why can't we manage urbanism this way?" And so began the development of the Rural-Urban Transect. Creatures live in context zones of the natural transect best-suited to them. Similarly, the Rural-Urban Transect provides a range of Transect Zones (or context zones) so people can choose the contexts best suited to them.

The difference between humans on the Rural-Urban Transect and all other creatures in the natural transect is that each species has a best-suited context, so they live there whereas humans have no single best setting on the Rural-Urban Transect; the choice of where to live comes down to choice, not biology.

Some humans prefer T-6 Urban Core where lights are brightest and there's more going on than anywhere else. Others prefer T-5 Urban Center, characterized by Main Street in the US and High Street in the UK. T-4 General Urban has the broadest range of building types and a strong mix of uses, which many prefer. T-3 Sub-Urban is not to be confused with suburban sprawl; T-3 is a context zone whereas suburban sprawl is an unsustainable development pattern outside the Rural-Urban Transect, but which can be transformed by what shelter shows call an "extreme makeover" into a range of Transect Zones (usually T-3 to T-5) that are economically and environmentally superior to the sprawl from which it came. T-2 Rural is exactly what the name implies: a context zone in the country filled with working lands for farming, forestry, and the like. T-1 Natural is land left undisturbed by human ventures and populated most lightly by humans who, like Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond, appreciate living in nature. This description obviously runs from most urban to most rural, in decreasing order of humans per land area while the diagram to the right is opposite, with the most urban context at the bottom of the diagram to appear closer while the most natural at the top appears furthest away.

DPZCoDESIGN developed the SmartCode, a development management code with an embedded Form-Based Code (FBC). It was the first urban code based on the Transect. Consistent with the generosity that has been a high ideal of the New Urbanism since the beginning, DPZ gave a colleague and I the first edition of the SmartCode which we used to transect-code a town for the first time. The project ultimately failed because we were in completely uncharted waters, but colleagues in Petaluma, California learned from our mistakes and were responsible for the first adopted SmartCode shortly thereafter.

The Center for Applied Transect Studies is the nerve center of all things Rural-Urban Transect and SmartCode.