Leon Krier’s checklist

Leon Krier, who died last week, had definite ideas about city design and its details, large and small. Reprinted below is Krier’s checklist for community design and implementation, written for the Prince’s Foundation (now the King’s Foundation) in 2020. 

The publication Walkability and Mixed-Use: Making Valuable and Healthy Communities features Krier’s article The Walkable City, illustrated by many of his brilliant polemical drawings (See the example at top. Interestingly, the City of the Pedestrian is associated with pleasure, while the Anti-City of the Motorcar is associated with boredom). The article and the publication are worth reading in their entirety.

The checklist should be studied closely, as it distills Krier’s city-building philosophy. In its broad sweep and attention to all scales of city building, it is reminiscent of the Charter of the New Urbanism. While the Charter expresses general principles, Krier’s list reads like specific instructions, and his unique eye, personality, language, and idiosyncrasies shine through.

Krier master-planned Poundbury, King Charles’s development, which has triumphed over many early critics, who did not like the King’s attitude toward modernist planning and architecture.

While many hands contributed to Poundbury’s success, Krier is the source of its charm.

The “quarter” referred to throughout the checklist is roughly equivalent to a mixed-use, walkable neighborhood. The following checklist is targeted at designing and building more livable and life-giving cities and towns. Which of them are most insightful, and do you disagree with any?

• Refuse to conceive, to design, to build, to develop, to permit conurbations of mono-thematic single-use zones generating daily mass mobilization.
• Refuse to conceive, to design, to build, to develop, to permit gated communities of whatever covenant.
• Conceive, design, build, develop, and permit the POLYCENTRIC CITY as a family of independent urban quarters.
• Conceive, design, build, develop, and permit each urban quarter as a WALKABLE, MIXED USE, mixed-income, mature, and open city within the city.
• Expand existing cities by the multiplication of mature urban quarters.
• Prohibit the vertical or horizontal over-expansion of mature urban quarters.
• Conceive, design, build, develop, permit HORIZONTALLY WALKABLE urban quarters not exceeding 33 Hectares /80 Acres in surface and 10 minutes walk across in any direction and VERTICALLY WALKABLE buildings not exceeding 3-5 floors or ca. 100 steps in height.
• Conceive, design, build, develop, permit a network of peri-urban and rural foot- and bridle-paths connected to the urban quarter network of streets, mews, passages allowing a variety of circular promenades into the surrounding countryside and parks not coinciding with extra muros roads.
• Limit building heights not metrically but by number of floors ensuring varied building volumes, street frontages and skylines.
• Conceive, design, build, develop, and permit building lots and blocks of dimensional, functional, and formal variety suited for mixed uses.
• Prohibit XXL private and public building programs to be packed into single, excessively large buildings. Break them up into their typologically irreducible components and disperse them throughout the urban quarter.
• Ban utilitarian skyscrapers and groundscrapers.
• Permit within each urban quarter a number of self-employed or employed jobs to approximate the quarter’s number of residential units, allowing the professionally active to find work-premises or EMPLOYMENT within the urban quarter and those working within the quarter to reside within walking distance.
• Design building lots and blocks of dimensional, functional and formal variety in such a way as to generate networks of attractive and varied public spaces in the form of streets, squares, mews, passages, commons, boulevards, avenues, parkways.
• Frame central squares and high streets with narrow lot- and block-fronts.
• Reserve ground floors and mezzanines of central square and high-street buildings for non-residential uses.
• Locate public buildings, monuments, fountains on public squares, on prominent spots and in the focus of major vistas.
• Limit urban quarters not by mere administrative boundaries but by walkable, ridable, drivable, cyclable boulevards, park ways, bridle paths, foot paths, tracks overlooking other urban quarters, parks, fields, orchards, vineyards, market-gardens, cemeteries, forests, lakes, rivers, beaches, and the ocean.
• Locate large single-use lots and blocks on the edge of urban quarter.
• Locate XXL sports and leisure facilities in the parks network, separating urban quarters.
• The basic urban fabric of private and commercial buildings are objects of vernacular construction and to be built of local natural materials.
• Monuments, belfries, fountains, public and sacred buildings, are to be conceived as landmarks, as the jewels of cities and villages. They are the privileged objects of classical architecture.
• Within each urban quarter pave squares wall-to-wall as “shared spaces,” without sidewalks.
• Within the urban quarter regulate vehicular speeds by street geometry with space and building measurements, not by signage, chicanes and paint.
• Within the urban quarter, avoid cross junctions, one-way streets, and cul-de-sacs.
• Design public lighting and lighting devices to comfort and please the eyes, enhance the landmarks and townscape, and not fulfill passing health and safety standards and recommendations. Avoid cold and orange-coloured light sources.
• Do not concentrate social rented accommodation in one zone or building, but pepper-pot residential tenures throughout the urban quarter.

The checklist is reprinted with permission from the King’s Foundation.