I agree that Prof. Hakim’s fine distinction between proscriptive vs. prescriptive codes has dramatic applications in the way we ground an approach to urbanism today. I’d be game to follow any further erudition on your last suggestion.

I think New Urbanists attempt to achieve generative urbanism through proscriptive means with the Transect, but end up falling into Julian’s trap the more they attempt to indoctrinate with pattern books or rely on overly-prescriptive urban design codes/review processes to affect their ends. (Of course, the Transect does not a city make,…but that’s another issue.)

There are also proscriptive processes embedded in all forms of art and self-expression…The room provided for self-expression should not be forgotten in your work. Julian Beinart, for example, did wonderful work on the tacit proscriptive processes at work with mural painting in Johannesburg’s shanty towns. Something of that process is implicit in the way suburbanites decorate their lawns for very dissimilar reasons.

You might be interested to know that Louis Kahn advocated a return to proscriptive Mediterranean “vista zoning” for the overlooking ridges surrounding the Old City of Jerusalem. He had a wonderful way of looking at the street as a space for “cross-invitation”…a place of “agreement”…some of this which, to be fair to Moshe Safdie, was executed in spirit when he followed Kahn’s plan for the rebuilding of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City.

Very interestingly, there are very notable exceptions to proscriptive approaches in Mediterranean town planning which can be found in the utopian literature of apocalyptic sects. The first modernists. The New Jerusalem Scroll of the absolutist Essene sect that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls depicts a “Cartesian” paradise.