Urban Affairs Review

Book Reviews Volume 44 Number 2

November 2008 296-304
© 2008 Sage Publications
The Code of the City: Standards and the Hidden http://uar.sagepub.com
Language of Place Making, by Eran Ben-Joseph. hosted at
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. 263 http://online.sagepub.com

pp. $60.00 (cloth).

DOI: 10.1177/1078087407311195

This book addresses the important question of how regulations affect the
design of the built environment in cities. The first part, “The Rise of the
Rule Book,” focuses on the subdivision of urban land, starting with the ear-
liest cities of Mesopotamia and including the U.S. Land Ordinance Survey.
It provides information about surveying as an activity that plays a deter-
mining role in shaping cities and about the neighborhood-planning models
that have set the tone for most of the contemporary subdivisions. The sec-
ond part of the book, “Locked in Place,” addresses urban infrastructure,
including the technology of wastewater, street standards and layouts, and
land-grading techniques. The third part, “Altering Inherited Traits,” pre-
sents ways in which the constraining effects of increasingly numerous and
rigid regulations in contemporary cities can be mitigated.
The book’s first chapter, “The Rise of the Rule Book,” is a delightful
overview of age-old ways of allocating urban land into lots, blocks, and
streets. It takes the reader to the Ancient Indus Valley, Japan and China,
Greece, Rome, Byzantine and Islamic cities, and Medieval Europe. The
second chapter, “Experts of the Trade,” introduces the powers of Roman
“agrimensores” (surveyors) in allocating land during the Roman Empire. It
demonstrates the effectiveness of Gunther’s chain, the simple, 66-foot mea-
suring device used by surveyors in the late eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies. A basic instrument of U.S. colonization, the chain has left ubiquitous
traces in both the countryside and the cities west of the Ohio River. The
third chapter, “Neighborhood Developed Scientifically,” adds to the exist-
ing literature on East Coast housing reforms at the turn of the nineteenth
century and on the early-twentieth-century efforts by the Regional Plan
Association to address the housing needs of a rapidly growing urban popu-
lation. The chapter serves as a useful summary of this determining period
in the shaping of American suburbia.
My favorite is the chapter “Sanitized Cities,” which recounts the story
behind the eventual selection of water-carriage sewer systems, which now
prevail in most cities of this continent. Ben-Joseph explains how sewer
infrastructure emerged as a tool to prevent decimating urban epidemics

296
 Book Reviews 297

(cholera and other infectious diseases related to unsanitary conditions). He

documents how dry or semidry vacuum sewer systems lost out in the
debates to select modern sewage systems. Current critics of these systems
may not realize that 100 years ago, water was seen by many as a “purify-
ing” agent and human waste as a costly and ineffective fertilizer. Also, the
capital-intensive centralized water purification systems eventually gathered
momentum because a growing number of high-paid expert professionals
had a stake in their becoming standard features of cities.
The chapter “Regulating Developers” has useful facts on the history of
tense relationships between developers and regulators. Ben-Joseph provides
evidence that while the private sector has rated regulations as the number one
impediment to lowering the costs of housing, it has not opposed all regula-
tions. The chapter also introduces interesting information on the public sec-
tor’s fears of litigation whenever regulatory change is suggested.
In the end, the book does not quite live up to its broad title, The Code of
the City. Anyone looking beyond the city as a collection of low-density res-
idential subdivisions and toward a city of autonomous neighborhoods, com-
plete with necessary daily services, will not find it in this book. And
discussions of where to go from here remain general, with few, and often
unconvincing, examples of sustainable urban layouts and related infrastruc-
ture. It is interesting to find no discussion of the New Urbanism movement,
which during the past decade has put forth and actually tested numerous code
reforms at many levels of city form, including land subdivision, neighbor-
hood structure, housing types, and so forth. The reader would have benefited
from Ben-Joseph’s review of this recent work in light of his understanding
of past practices.
The Code of the City will engage anyone interested in the general
processes of land development and building regulations that are behind the
making of cities. For policy makers, the book will confirm that seemingly
rational decisions made about new technologies or standards will, over
time, have numerous unexpected, and not always positive, consequences.
Ben-Joseph turned to history and began to document the impact of such
decisions on places that people live in. More work is needed on this subject
to guide urban design and planning in the future.

Anne Vernez Moudon

University of Washington, Seattle