The Hidden Designer: Rethinking Urban Rules in City Making

Urban rules have been used for centuries to control the interaction between actors involved in city-making and its translation into the built environment (Lehnerer, 2009). They are a stratified legacy that, especially from the Industrial Revolution, were overshadowed by the need for urban planning. On the counter stream, we are witnessing new tendencies: in a time in which European cities have to deal with progressive modifications rather than massive expansions is arising the role of design tools meant to transform the existing city. This paper builds on the analysis of the making of the ordinary urban fabric – the city intended as the combined result of spatial planning, market forces, swinging frames of reasoning, conformity to norms and individual expectations and aspirations. On this basis, this paper focuses on the role of urban codes in shaping the structure of our cities. Specifically, it aims at exploring the intertwined connection between urban codes and city morphology. Commonly urban codes are intended as a set of rules that regard singled out ‘elemental types’ (such as height, roofing, windows, and the like) and their relations within the built environment with no correspondence to a predetermined and unique location. In that, urban codes profoundly differ from plans, even if they both impact on the urban configuration.