THE CELLULAR LEVEL OF CITY PLANNING, URBAN DESIGN, and ZONING ADJUSTMENT

 

I started this essay after I read about a debate in Boston regarding a combined two-story and multi-story building with non-residential occupant activity across the street from at least one objecting landowner. The details were not clear, and I did not understand the unique grounds for objection in Boston, but the disagreements over adjacent activity, compatibility, intensity, and context sparked my interest.

If you believe that the physical pattern, mass, and condition of urban and rural shelter reflects the quality of human life present, and that the definition, measurement, evaluation, and planning of the physical intensity, context, compatibility, and condition occupied by activity within urban and rural areas are significant issues, then this essay may be of interest.

Shelter capacity and occupancy are separate topics. Capacity can be measured and the options mathematically predicted for any given land area. These project options represent levels of physical intensity. The combination of shelter capacity and intensity may be occupied by any activity. The result is physical context. Context choices have revenue and investment implications. They affect compatibility and influence quality of life beyond their immediate project boundaries, but we are missing the ability to measure these results, evaluate their implications, and improve our decisions.

INTRODUCTION

A building can shelter any permitted activity. Gross building area in square feet divided by the buildable acres occupied is the shelter capacity of the buildable land involved. It varies with the building design category chosen and the design specification values entered in its forecast model. The options produced have measurable capacity, intensity, intrusion, and context implications. The shelter decision is combined with occupant activity and location to add both investment and revenue potential. The shelter environment of every city represents a collection of these decisions, and they determine its financial (revenue) stability. The annexation of land is an attempt to improve this financial stability without a complete understanding of the correlated shelter capacity and activity decisions required to balance shelter capacity, intensity, and activity to achieve public revenue objectives.

The average revenue yield per acre produced in a city’s jurisdiction must equal its total cost per acre to operate, maintain, improve, and serve its debt. The profit per acre from a project ends with its sale. The municipal obligation to sustain the project does not end. It increases with project age. An investor hopes to leave with a profit. A city is left with an obligation.

THE CASE

A city knows that total annual revenue per acre must equal or exceed its total annual expense per acre, but a planning issue like that in Boston becomes a local conflict to be avoided because it is difficult, if not impossible, to correlate the debate with public issues beyond the immediate neighborhood. Very few, if any, cities have the correlated information systems, data science, and mathematical algorithms required to evaluate the revenue impact of an individual project proposal on its quality of life. Greater knowledge and mathematical evaluation is needed to assess project change that is a microscopic alteration in the urban anatomy, and that may represent either evolution or disease.

THE GOAL

I have believed for quite some time that our goal must be to shelter the activities of growing populations within a geographically limited Built Domain designed to protect their quality and source of life, the Natural Domain. It is a physical goal, however, based on the belief that the shelter capacity, intensity, and context of activity within a city can be mathematically correlated with the land available to produce an economic strategy capable of supporting an improved quality of life. It cannot be achieved with random projects pursued by the special interests of investors. The speculative approach of private interest cannot help appearing arbitrarily beneficial and insensitive to a neighborhood’s concern over the issue of “adjacent and compatible” activity. Fighting over symptoms will only distract us from building the information management and diagnostic tools needed to reach the goal.

URBAN DESIGN

Urban design plans with correlated physical, social, psychological, environmental, and economic objectives are needed to determine the shelter capacity, intensity and activity allocation required for municipal financial stability. A municipal land use plan that depends on annexation and rezoning to solve annual budget deficit with service reductions and isolated project development or redevelopment is not a recipe that can place public debate on a more solid foundation. Every project becomes an isolated skirmish without a strategy focused on demonstrable, comprehensive public and private benefit.

A city leaves its physical, social, and economic future to piecemeal fights over “adjacency and compatibility” at the microscopic, cellular project level of its urban and rural anatomy. The unwelcome result is continuing uncertainty and metastatic growth that continues to consume its source of life.

REPEAT FROM “THE MATHEMATICAL FOUNDATION OF SHELTER DESIGN DECISIONS”

I have written about building design categories, design specification templates, and the shelter capacity implications of specification value choices on many occasions using forecast models to illustrate the mathematical correlation required for consistent shelter capacity leadership.

My intent has been to put the discussion of shelter capacity and its relationship to our quality of life on an equal footing with the languages of real estate law and economics. The debate can only begin when a mathematical language of shelter capacity built on measurement, evaluation, prediction, and knowledge accumulation can forecast and guide the implications of land area, building design category, and specification value choices. These specification values lead to the formation of shelter capacity, intensity, intrusion, and context. The nascent awareness of the need for this leadership language and knowledge has been referred to as urban design, or city design in the words of my deceased but prescient professor, Rudolf Frankel.

I self-published “The Equations of Urban Design” on Amazon.com in 2020 to summarize and improve my work in three previous books entitled, “Land Development Calculations”, editions 1 and 2 published by McGraw-Hill in 2001 and 2010, and “The Science of City Design” self-published in 2016. They represent my continuing effort to explain the site plan allocation and floor quantity options that precede architectural design. It is the quantity allocation of building cover, parking cover, pavement, unpaved open space, and floor quantity in a site plan that determines shelter capacity options, context, and quality of life in mathematical terms equal to the leadership debate involved. The mission is to establish a consistent leadership language for shelter debate and land consumption decisions on a planet that does not compromise with failure to anticipate.

I also maintain a blog entitled, “Cities and Design” at www.wmhosack.blogspot.com that began in September 2010. It currently contains 257 essays for anyone interested in following the topic. The more recent essays are also included on LinkedIn. I would be happy to provide a complete Table of Contents to any request on LinkedIn.

REPEAT FROM “PURSUING URBAN DESIGN and ZONING KNOWLEDGE”

The Latin word for shelter, roof, or cover is “tegimen”. I pronounce it “tejimen”, even though this may offend Latin scholars, and would like to suggest the words “Tegimenics”, “Tegimenistics”, or “Tegimenology” as labels for those interested in pursuing the issue of shelter capacity and quality of life for growing populations in limited geographic areas on a planet, in a universe, that expects us to anticipate its unwritten Law of Limits. It is a language intended to give a quantitative voice and credible support for emerging topics many refer to as urban design or city design with its roots in the ancient planning of Hippodamus of Miletus.

Walter M. Hosack, August 2025

Photo of early grid plan of Piraeus, Greece

By Baedeker - Baedeker's Handbook of Greece, Leipzig.http://www.nautilia.gr/forum//attachment.php?attachmentid=31153&d=1236108867http://www.nautilia.gr/forum/showthread.php?t=36257&page=32, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8511294

Essay Regarding Article Entitled "Another Win at Toronto's Committee of Adjustment"

 I recently read a discussion on LinkedIn entitled, “Another win at Toronto’s Committee of Adjustment”. The issue concerned the transformation of a single-family home into a six-family apartment, but little detail was provided. The discussion focused on the lack of on-site parking, the proposal’s dependence on parking in the public right-of-way as a substitute, and the need to address the city’s housing shortage. There was no mention of the change in use being an issue beyond parking deficiency. The request was approved but the article prompted me to consider independent zoning regulations written as isolated laws that distract attention from the correlated issues and policy changes involved.

ZONING ADJUSTMENT

Zoning law seeks to define shelter design decisions with absolute requirements, but physical design involves the correlation of many related decisions. This means that they must be mathematically coordinated before their combined implications can define leadership intent. This lack of mathematical correlation, measurement, and evaluation has kept us from defining intent with the language needed to consistently guide the shelter design decisions of many toward common and accurately defined goals.

For instance, can a city permit 20 dwelling units per acre and require that they provide 1.5 parking spaces per dwelling unit when the combination does not fit on a given parcel in a properly zoned district because the dwelling unit areas planned by the developer produce a combined building footprint and parking lot area that is too large for the land available?

A developer can feel deceived when he/she cannot reach the density permitted. A city can feel obligated to compromise with a “variance” that grants an exception to its regulations. These exceptions reveal that there is no consistent leadership intent because absolute, isolated quantity requirements are not mathematically correlated to predict their combined shelter capacity, intensity, intrusion, and context implications. At the present time these terms are not even defined mathematically. This makes it impossible to express site planning leadership intentions in correlated terms that accurately define intent long before building appearance becomes an issue.

CORRELATION

Table 1 is a forecast model illustrating the correlation of design specification values that can be used to mathematically predict gross building area options for a given land area when the building is served by a grade parking lot around, but not under, the building on the same premise. I have referred to this category of shelter options as the G1 Building Design Category. Gross building area in this and any other category may be occupied by any permitted activity. Gross building area is the envelope that contains activity.

The objective of Table 1 is to predict gross building area capacity options for the land area given in cell F3 based on the design specification values and optional floor quantities entered in the gray cells of the table. The point I wish to make is that the gross building area predictions in cells B44-B53 of the table will change when any one or more of the 26 values entered in the gray cells of Table 1 is modified. These are the values that must be correlated to consistently measure, predict, and/or regulate the shelter capacity of land. (Shelter capacity is equal to gross building area potential divided by the buildable acres occupied.)

Shelter capacity implications are calculated from the design specification values entered in the gray cells of Table 1. Correlated line-item implications calculated from these values begin at cell A44 of the table.

There is no measurement and evaluation research that defines acceptable parameters of shelter capacity, intensity, intrusion, and context for a given building design category and land use activity group based on comprehensive, correlated design specification values. Until they are established, debate will continue to be distracted by isolated details that cannot be placed in perspective.

The internal capacity of the gross building options predicted for a given activity is a separate issue. Land area determines the scope of gross building area potential. Gross building area determines the scope of potential internal activity. The combination of capacity, intensity, activity, and location determines economic potential.

Zoning districts determine permitted activity relationships within a designated area. Forcing the land to produce excessive shelter capacity for activity is a desperate option that produces excessive intensity and compressed, congested context, but these are parameters that remain to be measured and defined by every city. They were initially debated when the tenements and congestion of the 18^th and 19^th centuries produced city planning and zoning to protect the public health, safety, and welfare, but “welfare” was never defined with the shelter capacity, intensity, intrusion, and context values that can protect a city’s “quality of life”. The concept was “minimum standards” for shelter development that have proven to be contradictory and ineffective definitions of leadership intent.

The values entered in the shaded cells of Table 1 are not recommendations. They are simply illustrations of the table’s ability to correlate diverse but related site planning information with its algorithm. If in actual use, a city would need to define the design specification parameters it would be willing to accept for each of these gray cell topics in every zone of permitted activity when a G1 Building Design Category was involved. The gross building area results would be a clear indication of comprehensive intent related to a land area of any size in a zone. The occupant activity and economic potential of the land and its shelter capacity are separate issues.

DENSITY VS. LEADERSHIP

Density is not a leadership measure. It does not guide the palette of design specification topics and decisions that are related to a building design category. Density is derived from the correlated shelter capacity and activity decisions mentioned. Ignoring the correlation required has simply been a recipe for the confusion and contradiction surrounding our current attempts to provide shelter capacity for the activities of growing populations within geographic limits capable of protecting both their quality and source of life.

PARKING VS. CIRCULATION

Parking serves the Shelter Division of the Built Domain and is intended to improve convenience. Streets serve the Movement Division and are intended to improve circulation. Compromising one for the other simply obstructs city anatomy and efficiency that may already be compromised. The problem is city patterns that do not easily adjust to change and adjacent activity that often reacts to single project proposals as foreign infections. It might help to begin by painting the broad picture involved even though it may appear academic.

DIVISIONS OF THE BUILT DOMAIN

There are two worlds on our planet, and the Built Domain is slowly consuming agriculture and the Natural Domain in the belief of some that growth can be unlimited. Others are searching for sustainable, symbiotic solutions; but this is a topic beyond the scope of this essay.

Classification of the Built Domain begins with its Rural and Urban Phyla. Each contains a Shelter Division served by Movement, Open Space, and Life Support Division arteries. The Shelter Division contains cells we refer to as parcels, lots, property, and so on. Each cell contains one or more of six building design categories. Each category is composed of a consistent list of mathematical design specification topics. These topics interact and the interaction is translated by a design category master equation to predict gross building area options based on the design specification and floor quantity options entered. When the gross building area options in sq. ft. are divided by the buildable land area in acres derived in cell F10, the result is a list of shelter capacity options in cells F44-F53 related to the floor quantity options entered in cells A44-A53 and the optional design specification values entered above. Line-item implications are presented on lines 44-53 and shelter capacity options are specifically shown in cells F44-F53 of Table 1.

In other words, all forecasts in the Planning Forecast Panel and Implications Module of Table 1 are implications calculated from the design specification values entered in the gray cells of the Land and Core Modules of Table 1. This is how the Shelter Division responds to stimulus in the anatomy of the Built Domain. A definition of intent is simply equal to a limitation of the line item implications calculated.

Please forgive me for repeating an earlier paragraph. “There is no measurement and evaluation research that defines acceptable parameters of shelter capacity, intensity, intrusion, and context for a given building design category and land use activity based on their design specification values. Until they are established, debate will continue to be distracted by isolated details that cannot be placed in perspective.”

URBAN DESIGN PLANS VS. PROJECTS

The impact of a shelter project on the anatomy of the Built Domain can be magnified when piecemeal project distraction replaces comprehensive urban design site planning over the larger neighborhood, district, and city areas needed to reconcile shelter capacity with the movement, open space, and life support arteries that serve it.

The issue becomes more complex when an exception to activities permitted in a zone is granted on a lot-by-lot basis. Additional exception requests inevitably follow on a random basis that dismantles the concept of a plan and encourages fragmentation.

Planning-by-exception simply produces unanticipated results downstream, further annexation, sprawl, excessive intensity, confusion over the scope of necessary adjustment, and continued debate over the definition of freedom and minimum regulation that cannot clarify intent.  

CONCLUSION

The LinkedIn discussion that prompted this response was a good summary of the relationship between public fear of change and private initiative based on opposing abilities to anticipate. It is the curse of transformation, and no one can be sure where it leads without long term evaluation of the "change" implied. People's lives are being affected. It is an impossible situation that can only be reconciled with better ability to predict the future implications of current decisions.

I continue to wonder if professional opinion will have anything better to offer until it begins to pursue Tegiministics. (If curious, please see my essay, "Pursuing Urban Design and Zoning Knowledge" on my blog at www.wmhosack.blogspot.com)”

Walter M. Hosack, August 2025

• picture credit: © Enoch Leung 2025  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/