Give every room in which people spend time daylight from at least two sides; plan the building in narrow wings so that this is possible.
Keep the cars at the edge
Make each neighbourhood a local transport area: cars reach it by a ring or edge road and park at its boundary, while inside the quickest way from place to place is on foot or by bicycle.
Alexander’s pattern does not ban cars but makes them slow and indirect inside the area. Vauban in Freiburg (1998–2006) built it: most residents agreed to live “parking-space-free”, with their cars in a solar-roofed multi-storey garage at the edge, and the residential lanes became play streets; a tram runs down the central avenue.
Related rules
Shape the space between buildings as carefully as the rooms: make outdoor spaces partly enclosed and convex, like outdoor rooms, rather than leftover gaps around freestanding objects.
Make neighbourhoods compact, pedestrian-friendly and mixed in use, with a clear centre and edge, so that daily needs lie within a short walk: about a quarter of a mile, five minutes, from centre to edge.
centre to edge ≈ ¼ mile ≈ 400 m ≈ 5 minutes on foot
Lay out the rows east–west so that the long, glazed face of every house turns to the south (in the northern hemisphere), taking the low winter sun and shading easily from the high summer sun.
Set the gap between rows so that the shadow of each row at noon on the chosen winter day falls short of the glazed face of the row behind it.
gap = H ÷ tan α, with α = 90° − latitude − 23.4° at the winter solstice (at 48° N, α ≈ 18.6°: gap ≈ 3 H)
Put an open public green within about three minutes’ walk of every house, large enough to be used and not just looked at.
≤ 750 ft (≈ 230 m) from every house
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Keep the cars at the edge”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/local-transport-area. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.