In the past I have talked about places and non-places. Places are the stuff that is "there" (such as parks, the inside of buildings, streets made for loitering), while non-places are the stuff that is dedicated to "getting there" and other fillers (roads, parking lots, setbacks, greenspace - a negative term I use to describe random strips of grass that are not parks, yards, or gardens.) We should care about this stuff because, as Strong Towns' principles state, land is the base resource from which community prosperity is built and sustained. It must not be squandered. Modern cities tend to dedicate a large percentage of their land to non-places.

I have also talked about the importance of granularity in our development pattern. A fine-grained development pattern diversifies land and property ownership, which:

fights economic polarization (the growing gap between the haves and have-nots),

forces good bones (a new property boundary every 40 feet means a door every 40 feet; this makes it much harder to build long blank walls),

fills a streetscape with many destinations (actually having things within walking distance encourages people to walk),

makes a place feel more intimate and human-scale,

is easier to redevelop for the second generation of owners (it is simpler to bulldoze or rehab a small lot than an entire block),

is less risky (an abandoned or ugly building only ruins a single lot and not the entire block)...

I could go on.

Modern zoning codes often require buildings to be setback from the property boundaries, and this is harmful to our cities because it rewards land consolidation (creating a coarser-grained development pattern) and encourages the creation of non-places to fill the setback with. The smaller your lots are, the greater the percentage of land that must be reserved for the setback.

Let's do the math and show an example. Imagine we have a 400 x 200 foot block with 10 foot set backs. We could plat the block in the following ways: