The pedestrian environment: Common yard; porch and fence

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

Frontage is the general term for what happens in the space between private buildings and public streets. The frontage includes all building and landscape elements forming the pedestrian experience. As explained in the previous installment of the Technical Page, there are at least eight frontage patterns that recur frequently and with considerable repetition of characteristics.

Towards the rural end of the Transect continuum, two ubiquitous traditional neighborhood frontages are the Common Yard pattern and the Porch and Fence pattern. The first frontage, Common Yard, is named for its most obvious, largest feature: a swath of unfenced continuous vegetation, often dominated by grass, between the road or street and an array of houses usually set well back from it. The second, the Porch and Fence pattern, overlays those two kinds of semipermeable architectural barriers on the front yard space, with houses pulled closer to the street; essentially, porch and fence compensate for the privacy lost in diminished distance.