Grand urban rules

the long version

"Grand Urban Rules is a tribute to the city's will to form, as shown through its vast number of steering regimes. The book contains a total of 115 significant ingredients for the Grand Project of our contemporary metropolis. Not always positive but always powerful, these rules are the inverted, abstracted and extracted image of a city's actual situation. Setting standards is first and foremost a cultural act. We read cities by their rules! Rules link the physical with the social city, connecting quality with quantity and latent characteristics to manifest ones. Thereby and almost unnoticed, they have become design instruments. In fact, regarding rules as tools offers a valuable (urban) design attitude -- departing from an approach that wants to control everything, and moving towards a non-fatalistic form of control between freedom and coercion."--Publisher's description.