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The Transect “A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it.” The SmartCode is a transect-based code. A transect of nature is a geographical cross-section of a region intended to reveal a sequence of environments. It helps study the many symbiotic elements that contribute to habitats where certain plants and animals thrive. Human beings also thrive in different habitats. Some would never choose to live in an urban core, and some would wither in a rural place. To provide meaningful choices in living arrangements, the rural-to-urban Transect is divided into six T-zones for application on zoning maps. These six habitats vary by the ratio and level of intensity of their natural, built, and social components. They are coordinated by these T-zones to all scales of planning, from the region through the community scale down to the individual lot and building. CENTER FOR APPLIED TRANSECT STUDIES The Center for Applied Transect Studies (CATS) promotes understanding of the built environment as part of the natural environment, through the planning methodology of the rural-to-urban transect. CATS supports interdisciplinary research, publication, and training for the design, coding, building and documentation of sustainable transect-based communities. Pictured here is the Guest House, the Miami home of CATS, and its inaugural seminar, the Fall 2007 SmartCode Retreat hosted by Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.
All diagrams ©DPZ & Co. |
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Discovery Close to Home A transect was first used for biogeographical analysis by naturalist Alexander von Humboldt in the late 18th Century. In the late 20th century in Miami Beach, Andrés Duany and his brother Douglas identified a rural-to-urban transect of the built environment from the T-1 beach through T-3 and T-4 neighborhood fabric to T-5 and T-6 mixed use corridors. They and other New Urbanists also recognized that sprawl was eradicating the organic pre-war transect of America's towns and cities. They began to analyze local transects and extract their "DNA" for regeneration. In this way, they codified human habitats and established the basis for the SmartCode.
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