Performance Codes

Definition

Performance codes are Jane Jacobs's regulatory alternative to zoning: "prohibitions of destructive performances" replacing the regulation of uses, densities and ground coverages (Jacobs 2004, p. 153). The concept's diagnosis is that zoning regulates the wrong variables: "Zoning rules and tools neglect performances that outrage people. What are actually needed are prohibitions of destructive performances. To attend hearings on zoning and planning conflicts is to learn that feared changes are not actually about land uses, densities, and ground coverage but rather about dreaded side effects" (p. 153). The fears catalogue: (1) noise from mechanical sources; (2) bad smells and air, water and soil pollution; (3) heavy automotive through-traffic and truck traffic; (4) "Destruction of parks, loved buildings, views, woodlands, and access to sun and sky"; (5) blighting signs and illumination; (6) "Transgressions against harmonious street scales" (p. 154). Each admits specification: decibels from a building or its property; particulate and chemical measurements for smokestack pollution; "Maximum dimensions of signs and maximum candlepower of outdoor illumination"; and — "even more important" — "length of unbroken street frontages of buildings… with standards varying for streets with varying existing scales of height and frontages" (pp. 154–155). Scale is not merely aesthetic: "Scale connects with many other aspects of performance; these connections are often really at issue in conflicts ostensibly about uses, densities, or ground coverage" (p. 155).

The concept's historical target is zoning's three founding assumptions — "High ground coverages are bad. High densities (numbers of people or numbers of households per acre) are bad. The mingling of commercial or other work uses with residences is bad" — "rejections of cities and city life, devised by utopians and reformers… The tools are unsuitable except for creating sprawl, even when they are subject to appeals and amended into incoherence" (pp. 153–154). Its methodological virtues: "A chief advantage of performance codes, especially those updated in light of changing technologies, will be the incentive they offer to solve practical problems that traditional zoning tried to 'solve' merely by banishing offenders to poor or politically disregarded parts of town or, recently, to politically feeble parts of the globe" (p. 155); easy convertibility of premises (years and huge legal costs under zoning); and enforcement by civil court orders rather than criminal fines (p. 156). Its honesty about limits: odor regulation must "accept subjective, popular judgments about offensive smells" because "objective measurements of odor intensity, and quality, are non-existent" (p. 154); destructive individual behavior is "best dealt with by police and bar owners," not land-use rules; and "too much of the same thing, unalleviated by other uses… doesn't work constructively. In cities, differing uses in close proximity tame one another" (p. 156). The code must stay alive: "no code can remain static. Obnoxious performances of which we now have no idea will doubtless appear in future" (p. 157). Its human resource is a problem: "The training and credentialing of planners and zoners does not equip them for this task" (p. 157) — see credentialing.

Key Thinkers

• Jane Jacobs — the concept's author: performances against uses; the six-fear catalogue; the frontage-and-scale standard; the convertibility and enforcement mechanics (2004).
• Mies van der Rohe (not yet paged — see log) — the epigraph's source: "'God is in the details'… In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details" (p. 153).
• Michael Mortensen (not yet paged — see log) — the parallel practitioner case: Vancouver's shift from prescriptive to discretionary zoning as the adjacent reform (Jacobs's notes, pp. 216–217).

Related Concepts

• separation-of-uses — the zoning doctrine the performance code replaces; the three bad assumptions as its founding ideology.
• densification — the context: performance codes are "absolutely necessary to overcome suburban sprawl decently" — but different ones than created sprawl (p. 153).
• mixed-primary-uses — the programme the code permits: uses, not uses' mixture, were the problem; "differing uses in close proximity tame one another" (p. 156).
• new-urbanism — the reform-movement register: form-based codes are zoning's internal reform, performance codes its external replacement.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Dark Age Ahead (Jacobs 2004) — the performance prohibition principle (p. 153); the three zoning assumptions (p. 153); the six-fear catalogue (p. 154); odor's subjective standard (p. 154); pollution measurements (p. 155); sign dimensions and candlepower (p. 155); heights and frontages with scale variation (p. 155); scale's functional connections (p. 155); behavior dealt with by police, uses taming one another (p. 156); civil-order enforcement and easy convertibility (p. 156); the code's necessary evolution (p. 157); the planners' training deficit and the collaboration proposal (p. 157).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Dark Age Ahead ingest; awaits the form-based-coding literature (SmartCode, Duany) and the legal scholarship on performance zoning to sit the concept in the regulatory-design field.

Open Questions

• Jacobs's frontage standard ("length of unbroken street frontages… with standards varying for streets with varying existing scales," p. 155) generalizes her 1961 scale-of-frontage zoning proposal. Is the performance code the maturation of that 1961 idea or its replacement — and what happened to the earlier proposal's zoning-for-diversity instruments?
• The code's sixth fear — "transgressions against harmonious street scales" — imports an aesthetic criterion into regulation. Can harmony be specified without becoming the design diktat Jacobs elsewhere indicts (neighbourhood-character's "built-form controls can easily become social controls")?
• Performance codes regulate outcomes; zoning regulates categories. The wiki's suburban-governance sources document how existing instruments are captured by growth politics. Is a performance code more capture-resistant (its standards are technical) or more (its discretion invites the corridor capture Jacobs's own Vancouver discretionary-zoning reservations describe)?