The Transect

UPDATE – From the feedback in the comments I decided to add a little on how and why the Transect is useful for Houston, see the end of the post.

This week I’ll be writing about the future of Houston, and how we can embrace and encourage growth in a sustainable way. To do this, we’ll look at some best practices in market-driven urban development and land planning, then see how those techniques could be applied locally. To explain how this applies to Houston I’ll be referring back to some of the terminology that I described last week in my series on Property Values, and an earlier series on Transportation Theory.

The first thing I’d like to look at is the Transect. In a nutshell, “transect” is a term from ecological sciences which refers to the change in a pattern as you move in a straight line, for instance, the change in typology and decrease in number of plants as you move up a mountain to higher and higher altitudes.

The Natural Transect - From the Center for Applied Transect Studies

Human settlements are part of the natural environment, and where they exist in undistorted free-market settings tend to closely follow a transect pattern, which is the downward progression of density from an urban core outward to an agricultural or undeveloped fringe. This is urban transect, which I’ll simply call the Transect. You can read a great description of the Transect idea at CATS, and if you’re not familiar with the idea I encourage you to take a look at what they have to say.

The Transect is generally broken into six scales of development, which are:

• T1: Natural Areas
• T2: Rural Areas
• T3: Sub-Urban Areas
• T4: General Urban Areas
• T5: Urban Centers
• T6: Urban Cores

These are easiest to understand visually, as shown in the image below. Again, the idea is that there is a natural progression from rural land to urban cores that always forms in cities.

A Transect for Fayetteville, Arkansas - from Dover, Kohl + Associates

Transect models help cities and regions understand the natural shape of urban growth and steer their investments accordingly. This is especially relevant for Houston, because the Transect does not need to account for individual land-uses, but only overall development intensity. It is a type of planning that is compatible with the unzoned nature of our city, and is in fact superior to zoning as a method for intelligently coordinating public infrastructure investment and private development activity.

This is just a brief introduction to idea of the Transect, there’s plenty more available to read online. I encourage you to take a look and get familiar with the topic, as it’s a key component of the discussion here at neoHOUSTON and around the nation.

Why the Transect Matters:

The Transect gives us a useful set of vocabulary for talking about different kinds of neighborhoods without relying on zoning terminology. Since Houston is ardently anti-zoning, it’s hard to call an area “residential,” or “commercial” without implying a level of control over land use that we don’t have and don’t want.

The Transect is helpful because it provides descriptions for areas that are predominately single-family and low density commercial (T3 – Suburban) as distinguished from areas that are denser with some small shops etc. but still mainly residential (T4 – General Urban)… and so on.

Whether we decide to use the Transect to guide future growth or not, it still provides a very helpful description of the different kinds of areas that exist in the unzoned city as it’s currently built. When we have a better understanding of what kind of neighborhoods exist on the ground we can tie in our infrastructure design and planning more effectively.