The strategy of time and change

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

The ability to evolve is among the most important and underestimated differences between conventional zoning and Transect-based development. The social and economic forces at work on places are always changing. It is better to anticipate change and channel it intelligently than to ignore it and ultimately collapse under its force.

Study of sequential images of any evolving historic city reveals this. Dallas, for example, even in its relatively short history, has evolved from what were essentially hovels, to houses, then to brick commercial buildings and on to skyscrapers — all within the same urban grid. The North Dallas  suburbs, by contrast, are a collage of housing subdivisions and shopping centers that have thrived, and sometimes died, in the forms in which they were originally built. Various mechanisms militated against their evolution: the rigidity of zoning, the death-grip of the property owners’ associations, and the inflexible finality of the building types.