The Three Rules

I have posted a PDF which explains The Three Rules of Urban Design. It's an extract from my book City Comforts.

Just click here to download it. (If the size of the file presents a problem for you, please email me and I will see what I can do.)

Practically and theoretically The Three Rules are the fundamental "pattern generator" for creating "city-ness." When it comes to figuring out how to make a walkable neighborhood or city, after The Three Rules everything else is epilogue.

UPDATE: And don't miss this animated GIF which illustrates the difference between "city" and "suburb."  It's really quite amazing (and hard to believe until you start observing it for yourself) but the whole world of urbanism revolves around the location of the parking lot.

Comments

[sGreer]

I tried to d/l the pdf and got eleven pages of...nothing. Is there an error in the file? Have any other Mac users reported this? Or is it a sign that I'm not yet enlightened and therefore must contemplate the zen-ness of blank space in ref. to urban development?

[leroy]

Mac user - using navigator 7, down loaded Adobe Reader 5 - Mac OS 9.2 Blue & white G 3, 4 GB, and after David emailed a copy to me in Reader 5 was able to open Reader and got all the text, but no graphics. Get a message "problem reading this document (9)"
Looked for error messages everywhere - Apple, adobe, in the index to Reader 5, changed prefs etc.
The fancier they get the more problems there are.

Hmmm - could this be a comment on city planning as well?

The text alone is understandable without the graphics - interesting ideas and concept. Requires rearranging thinking.

[Glen Raphael]

SGreer - It's not just you; I got the same symptom - trying to view the pdf link using the OSX Preview application produced a totally blank 11-page pdf.

[David Sucher]

Oops! Back to work!

Please note that we created a new PDF and uploaded it to this post.

[n.f.]

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is supposed to have said 'God is in the details,' so your paraphrase on pg. 54 is pretty strong.
The saying "Form follows function" is from Louis Henri Sullivan. He actually "Form ever follows function" in 'The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,' which was published around 1900, when Mies was a teenager.

[David Sucher]

Oops.

[DURP]

Very Good Information.