The Codes Project

The Codes Project – website is “an anthology of the codes, laws and related documents that have created, or sought to create, particular urban forms.”  This project, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, covers codes from “around the world, and from all time periods.”

The Directory section gives a sense of the breadth of this project.  You can find everything from the Code of Hammurabi dating from the 3rd millenium B.C. to Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language (1977) to the Downtown Los Angeles Strategic Plan (1997) to the Growing Smart Legislative Guidebook (2002) to the Australian Jindee Design Code (2009).  Click Middle East and you see codes and treatises from the 1st c. B.C. to the 14th c. Ibn al-Rami code.  You can search by subjects Buildings, Streets, Neighborhoods, Towns Regions, and Model Procedures.

Image shown here is from the Codes in Real Life tab, a map from Philadelphia’s One Hundred Per Cent “Intra City” Business Property Atlas, ca. 1933.

Found this site via Wisconsin Public Radios’s City Living page*, itself worth a visit.  It links to a series of shows on urban life, with associated books and related links.  Thanks, Jim, for the tip!

*Originally I said this was NPR’s program.  My mistake!