Hence the need for a new book, an effort to weaponize Walkable City for deployment in the field. Organized for easy access, worded for arguments at the planning commission, illustrated for clarity, and packed with not just data but specifications, Walkable City Rules is designed to be the most comprehensive tool available for bringing the latest and most impactful city planning practices to bear in your community. It is hoped that the format, as well as the information it holds, will allow it to be a force multiplier for place-makers and change-makers everywhere.

And if you haven’t read Walkable City, you should. It may be the best document available for winning converts to the cause. But, in the end, Walkable City is for readers. Walkable City Rules is for doers—like you.

If I can get autobiographical for a moment, here is a synopsis of my professional life since 1992: I spent twenty years listening to the best planners explain their best ideas the best way they knew how. I then wrote those ideas down in Walkable City, improving them if at all possible. Next, I recorded the Audible version of the book, which I then bought, and began listening to on airplanes. (Hearing my own voice calmly say familiar things seems to help me sleep.) Eventually, I memorized it. This has really been a great help, both in my lectures and in my work with cities and towns across North America.

I plan to do the same with Walkable City Rules. I hope you will too—all of you. In my dreams, I imagine that this book is as familiar to you as it is to me. We are like the lifers in that old prison gag, telling jokes to each other by the number. Instead of asking a public works official to do a road diet, we just say “46!” Instead of admonishing a developer to hide a parking structure, it’s “92!” And they all understand what we mean: in my dream prison, nobody tells the joke wrong.

Why are these Rules? I considered calling the book Walkable City Patterns, as a tribute to Christopher Alexander and a continuation of his technique of presenting a collection of co-dependent design principles across the full range of scales. But, as Alexander has himself admitted, today’s built environment is more than anything else the outcome of rules, an octopus-like litany of codes and ordinances that more often than not produce unfortunate if not unintended outcomes. You can’t fight rules with patterns, so Rules it is.

Let’s get started.