Is This Development "Out of Scale"?
Are tall buildings that tower above their surroundings inappropriate?
I've talked with people whose answer to that is "Yes, obviously," but when pressed, no one has ever given me an explanation that doesn't reduce to, "I just don't like it." So here's a question: do you find these landscapes beautiful?
What about these urban scenes, first shared on Twitter by San Francisco activist Laura Foote (of yimbyaction.org) ?
You may love these eclectic city scenes. You may hate them. I lean toward the "love" side, personally: I think strong juxtapositions between tall and short buildings can be startlingly beautiful in the way they direct the eye, add drama to the landscape, and do interesting things with light and shadow, especially in the early morning or waning evening hours. The occasional standout structure adds interest in the same way that, in music theory, a composition that never follows the rules will be unlistenable, but a composition that never breaks them may simply be boring.
And as for the supposed negatives of height itself? Anti-development advocates routinely use the phrase "concrete canyons" to disparage buildings taller than 2 or 3 stories, as though real canyons weren't often tourist attractions people will travel hundreds of miles to see precisely because of their beauty.
The West End of Vancouver, BC, a neighborhood characterized by an eclectic mix of building heights and types, which challenges assumptions about compatibility.
Ultimately, though, I don't have to convince you to like tall buildings. Let alone do I care if you want to live in one, or buy a home next to one. The point is that the argument that tall buildings should not exist near short buildings for reasons of compatibility is fundamentally about subjective preferences, and we should be intellectually honest in recognizing that.
"Out of Scale" as Garbage Language
I wrote in March 2020 about the use of "garbage language" in talking about cities and their development—phrases that serve to obscure meaning rather than illuminate it. In it, I called out such empty urban buzzwords as "livable" or "vibrant."
Here's another one that drives me nuts: "out of scale."
I hear this phrase—or a closely related one, "incompatible"—used all the time by those with strong negative opinions about existing buildings or proposed ones. "Out of scale" sounds a bit like architectural or design jargon. It's a way of applying a veneer of objectivity or authority to what is really just subjective disapproval (almost always of something the speaker deems too big or too tall). But it doesn't actually identify a concrete problem.
At least, it doesn't when used as an aesthetic complaint. There is a valid critique of "out of scale" development, and it's one integral to the Strong Towns vision of resilient, financially sound cities—more on that later. But it's not what the language is most often associated with.
Unfortunately, the vague notion of "incompatibility" has even made it into many city codes and planning documents, where it functions as a catch-all justification for any advocate or elected official to object to a proposal they personally dislike. This trend is harmful to our ability to talk about urban form, urban design, and development regulation in constructive ways. When we frame the debate around "compatibility" or "scale," it quickly drags the whole thing into culture-war territory.
You can't win a culture war through reasoned argument. Those who understand debates over zoning and development intensity as a contest between two competing visions of the good life—in caricature, an urban vision of lively, eclectic, "live-work-play" neighborhoods and a suburban vision of greenery and family-friendly tranquility—are likely to retreat to their corners. They're likely to view these conflicts as existential and zero-sum, to be paranoid and angry, and to believe that a proper role of government is to safeguard their preferred way of life and all of its signifiers from those who wish to "impose" something different.
Just witness the ongoing pundit furor over "abolishing the suburbs," which is totally unmoored from any real understanding of what the suburbs are as an economic entity, how they came to be through regulatory processes and infrastructure policy, or the ongoing fiscal consequences of their prevailing development pattern.
This conversation is detached from reality. We need to make real policy based on things that are real, like how a place serves—or fails to serve—the pressing needs of those who occupy it, and how that place will sustain itself and withstand the winds of change. Vague aesthetic signifiers like "incompatible” or “out of scale” do a disservice to this conversation.
The scale argument that matters: function, not form.
A counterargument might be that buildings are in fact out of scale when they are not built to a human scale, and that that determines how people interact with them and how compatible they are functionally (not aesthetically) with their surroundings.
Human scale is a real, objective thing in a way that "big ugly eyesore" isn't. We are bipedal mammals who average a little under 6 feet tall, and this determines some crucial aspects of how we relate to the world. For example, the Gehl Door Average is one of my favorite attempts to codify the human scale in a rule of thumb. It's rooted in something real: how long does it take to walk past the front of a building, and how long can it hold your interest? There are all sorts of rules of good design that come down to human psychological comfort. These are things we can actually study on an empirical level.
One of the tallest buildings in New York City next to an older mid-rise building. Photo by Andrew Price.
Yet, as long as humans are bound to the earth's surface by the law of gravity, I would argue that the effects of scale are important primarily in the horizontal, not vertical, dimension. A 10-story building and a 50-story building look pretty equivalent from the sidewalk, as the accompanying photo by Andrew Price demonstrates. For that matter, so do a 4-story and 10-story building (perhaps the more likely trade-off if you live somewhere that is not Manhattan).
What matters most is not height, the strange obsession of many an armchair urban-design expert, but whether the sidewalk-level design is good and sufficiently granular.
And granularity matters, as I argue in "A City Shaped By Many Hands," not just for the tactile experience of exploring a place, but for its long-term resilience. A place owned or controlled by many hands, and made up of an eclectic mix of structures, will fare better over time, because it can evolve by small degrees—one business closure here, one building renovation there—rather than its fate being determined as a unit. When a small number of people or decisions are instrumental in shaping a place's present and future, the likely effect of any mistakes in judgment or foresight will be magnified.
This is a case against mega-developments, and for the distributed ownership of smaller parcels of land among many owners. But the case is a functional one: it’s about the actual consequences of building in one way versus another, not preference or ideology.
When we plan and build at huge financial scales, we create fragile outcomes—because mistakes such as misjudging or mistiming the market leave huge scars on the landscape. But this isn’t about the size of the buildings. It’s about the increment of capital. Financially out-of-scale development doesn’t look like a four-story building next to a two-story home. It most often looks like this:
Meadows and Villas, a “zombie subdivision” in Florida planned and abandoned in the pre-2008 housing market crash.
A useful analogy is that of bodybuilding via a disciplined diet and exercise regimen, versus bodybuilding by the use of anabolic steroids. The development equivalent of steroids looks like using debt financing to build massive master-planned communities; it looks like recklessly expanding infrastructure while deferring maintenance costs into the indefinite future. It can be found in the exurbs of Florida or Arizona but also in high-rise Manhattan or San Francisco or Miami: anywhere that explicit or implicit subsidy is used to defy economic gravity, to make development happen that would not otherwise be financially viable. It’s immensely costly in the long run, as these places tend to falter once the subsidy goes away, and also suppress the more incremental, unsubsidized growth that would be organically occurring otherwise.
(Perhaps worth noting: even a startlingly eclectic mix of building heights like that of Vancouver’s West End, pictured above, doesn’t necessarily imply any financial or regulatory shenanigans. Buildings are developed at different times, and in a rapidly changing city with permissive zoning rules, eclecticism will be the natural result of simple randomness. A place with rising land values will see some plots of land redeveloped at a higher density, while others—maybe right next door—are not, perhaps for no other reason than the owner has not wished to sell.)
The Strong Towns call for incremental development is really a call for places that are designed to be responsive to ongoing feedback, constantly evolving by many small steps. And it has always been because of the very real, specific consequences of not doing so. It's actually to the advantage of a certain kind of change-averse defender of the status quo (dare I say NIMBY?) to frame every debate about cities from the get-go as merely a culture war between competing aesthetic or lifestyle preferences.
And look: it’s not even that aesthetics are irrelevant. They just shouldn’t come first, or be the center of the discussion. A look through the history of cities—and literally, pick any continent with cities on it (sorry, Antarctica)—reveals that the process of incremental evolution, refinement, preservation and restoration and adaptation that produces a resilient place tends also, with great reliability, to produce places that are well-loved and widely considered beautiful.
And they might even be beautiful in ways that surprise you. Or that break what you thought were the rules.
Local government is supposed to be the highest form of collaboration, but it doesn’t always feel that way. Too often, city rules favor opponents of change, meaning one dissenting voice can doom a project. However, Jersey City demonstrates how cities can increase collaboration by adopting an iterative approach to city planning.