Lean Transect: Four Urban T-zones and the Pocket Code

The rural-to-urban Transect is intuitively appealing as a framework for planning, zoning, and design, and the SmartCode is the most mature system, and still the only unified model code, employing it. The Transect concept has spread to hundreds of towns and cities across the country, with and without the SmartCode. The shared T-zone language among different placemaking disciplines is one of its many benefits, but there can be confusion about how to apply it on the ground.

In this webinar, we’ll experience the Transect along the fine-grained walkable streets where we really live, or wish we did. We’ll zoom in on the portion of the Transect most essential to walkable urbanism: the four urban Transect Zones, T3, T4, T5, and T6. We’ll address the importance of sketching the pedestrian shed as a “container” within which several T-zones provide distinct choices of habitats. Numerous photographs from the Transect Collection image resource will make these habitats come alive. We’ll also take a look at the new five-page model Pocket Code, a tool of the Project for Lean Urbanism.

Sandy Sorlien is an urban code writer, photographer, and environmental educator. She is former Director of Technical Research for the Center for Applied Transect Studies (CATS), and was the managing editor for the DPZ SmartCode and its Modules from 2005 to 2010. In 2010 she produced the Neighborhood Conservation Code based on the SmartCode. With the support of CATS, in 2011 she created the Transect Collection photographic resource. She is a collaborator in the Project for Lean Urbanism, and in the spirit of Lean wrote a five-page Pocket Code in 2013, available open source at Smartcode Local. She is the author with Andrés Duany of the position paper on Lean Codes, and the Lean Lexicon, both posted on the Lean Urbanism site. Also in 2013, Sandy joined the Fairmount Water Works, the watershed education division of the Philadelphia Water Department, where she develops programming about the urban watershed.

In 2014, Sandy and a group of motivated neighbors drafted the Roxborough (Philadelphia) Neighborhood Conservation Overlay, adopted into law in December of that year. This effort led to a Knight Cities Challenge award from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in 2015. Sandy is the Project Lead for the winning concept, one of just 32 nationwide out of more than 7000 applicants. She and the Central Roxborough Civic Association will produce a Neighborhood Conservation Kit, a set of open source tools to help citizens plan their own communities.