If I understand your points correctly, I agree with you.

But if I am a developer or a city planner with a parcel of property ripe for development, what conditions or restrictions should be made so that a desirable dense urban development can emerge over time? That is a question that interests me.

I wonder whether you have discovered some basic rules that would not unduly burden today’s developer, but would provide conditions that would allow for future fractal-generating development that eventually (100 years, 200 years?) would yield the high-density development that is so appealing. Developers in the U.S. often already work within numerous restrictions on lot size, frontage, etc. which as you noted do not create the necessary conditions. Even when the development is characterized as “smart growth.”

Rather than force developers to build high-density mixed-use developments, ask them to build the low-density developments that they seem to want to build, but with conditions that allow and encourage future development that leads to a higher density organically.

Maybe that means setting aside a portion of the parcel for a community center that can become a retail center and eventually a town square, for example. I don’t know if or how that would work, but that’s one possibility.

What do you think?

The condition for an emergent urbanism project is whether the process can repeat itself within the forms that are set in the previous iteration of development. All of the processes in the model above can loop and feed back on themselves, and thus they are all complex and fractal-generating. They have, however, scale limits. If those scale limits are not respected in development, the feedback won’t take place and there won’t be any emergent urban complexity.

I understand that people like high-density cities. I like them as well. But forcing high-density cities on a process that is not meant to create them, the subdivision process, only serves to make the process worse and not better. It makes enemies of land developers who see the absurdity of the effort, and creates another showcase of the failure of repression to force great cities to exist, and worst of all, spreads horrible type 2 linear process geometry on the landscape.

“[a] Instead we should be building low density subdivision developments [b] that can grow naturally into metropolitan neighborhoods . . .”

The current car-oriented suburbs satisfy [a] but most probably do not satisfy [b].

I highly doubt that such a community would control growth in such a way as to lead to the dense urban development that we find in the older core of European cities that people find so attractive.

What restrictions should the community be making to retain public spaces and prepare for future development?