Reforming Sprawl Zoning

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The Transect as a Model for Organizing Communities and Regions

Note: Students have begun creating this introduction to the important concept of the rural-to-urban Transect. CNU members are welcome to suggest ways of improving and this resource. Use the comment bar below to suggest changes.

By enforcing a strict separation of uses, current zoning codes help turn communities into a succession of monocultures — subdivisions, office parks, and shopping malls. There is a better model, though, for structuring regions and communities within them to reinforce the character of distinct settings ranging from rural reserves and hamelts to city neighborhoods and urban cores. To change our landscape, we must reinvent the codes that have been driving suburban sprawl for the last 60 years.

As a system for organizing the elements of urbanism and the environment across a region or a smaller setting, the Transect is becoming the basis for an increasing number of zoning code reform efforts. According to the originator of this concept, CNU-co-founder Andres Duany, the Transect is a geographical cross-section of a region used to reveal a sequence of environments. (More generally, transects are used in a variety of disciplines including geography to describe a sequence of settings, for example, from deep sea to shallow bank to sand shore to sandy marsh or grassland. See http://www.georesources.co.uk/csd1.htm a coastal transect. )

"This cross-section can be used to identify a set of habitats that vary by their characteristics- a continuum that ranges from the most rural to the most urban, wrote Duany and University of Illinois professor Emily Talen in outlining the principles of the Transect in a special New Urbanism edition of Get Smart, the newsletter of the Smart Growth Network in November 2004. "This idea strives to link human and natural environments into one conceptually continuous system. This model promotes rural and urban patterns that are sustainable, while providing an array of environments."

The Transect is a system for ordering the complex components of urbanism and environmentalism in a straightforward framework. A gradient describes how a region’s settings extend from rural wilderness to dense urban cores. The sections of the spectrum are designated T1 through T6, but gradations between and within zones and local variations are infinite. More detailed specifications can define the characteristics of buildings on these smaller scales.

The transect model should be seen as a link between new urbanism and environmentalism. It creates urban areas that are compact, pedestrian-oriented and mixed in use while reducing market pressure for low-density sprawl. This in effect encourages the embrace and maintenance of natural, less developed areas.

• A Good Solution For Regional Balance
• Three Principles For Organizing The Built Environment

Last edited by Steve Filmanowicz. Based on work by steve filmanowicz and JamesCarlson.  Page last modified on September 02, 2005