The most durable element of any city is its subdivision. Streets and plot boundaries outlast the buildings on them by an order of magnitude, and they determine what those buildings can be.
Dimensions that work
Blocks between 70 and 110 metres on their shorter dimension support a wide range of typologies, permit fine-grained subdivision, and produce a walkable intersection frequency. Larger blocks foreclose options permanently.
Coding the interface
A code should govern the interface between plot and street — height, setback, entrance frequency, ground-floor use, materiality — and leave everything behind that line to the architect. This produces coherence without uniformity.
Against the illustrative masterplan
The rendered aerial view of a completed masterplan is a communication device that has been mistaken for a planning instrument. It depicts one of thousands of valid outcomes, and it ages badly. The structure plan and the code are the deliverables that matter.