interlocking urbansim

Age-friendly design and collective democratization of space.

One approach to creating more incremental development within large swaths of land planned for megadevelopment is Interlocking Urbanism. Borrowed from my upcoming book, How to Make Places Go44, Interlocking Urbanism—or Puzzle Platting—is a development approach that moves beyond the rigid, siloed nature of traditional parcelization. It recognizes that urban parcels are not isolated units but pieces of a larger, interwoven fabric. Interlocking parcels do not just address the street or alley but also the adjacent parcels, allowing co-habitable and communal spaces that are interstitial in nature and safer by design.

What is a "puzzle plat"?

Puzzle Platting reimagines how cities can empower hyperlocal development by transforming systems of the relationship of parcels with each other. Imagine an approval process that helps to encourage synergy between disparate properties, and allows additional democratization of spaces and uses. It borrows from a the concept of Mutualismo (mutualism), cooperative economic and social model rooted in Latin American traditions.

Nothing is in and of itself, yet, our development patterns have become individualistic and insular, fencing themselves off rather than allow co-created spaces and places. Think edges instead of seams. Reforming minimum lot sizes and subdivision regulations mean new developments can be treated like miniature HOAs. Rather than treating parcels as self-contained objects oriented solely to streets or alleys, Interlocking Urbanism challenges us to think of adaptive adjacency, where new and existing developments respond to each other, forming quasi-public spaces that foster organic connections between residents. These interstitial spaces—small courtyards, shared gardens, common areas—become arenas of porosity and osmosis, allowing the pedestrian realm to flow between private, semi-private, and public domains

Methodology

The Smart Block Hyperlocal Overlay Toolkit essentially solves these problems with a functional integration of socioeconomic and life-cycle uses. The overlay is written to allow several typologies of development from a set toolkit on current vacant and abandoned land in targeted areas, allowing the municipality to creatively piece together land and package them to residents and developers on a parcel by parcel basis. These parcels become possibilities for the placement of Smart Blocks, parcel typologies or components created to allow for density, self-sufficiency, power generation, food production, and economic activity on what were previously vacant lots. The Smart Block concept helps to create hyperlocal 15-minute neighborhoods where most physical and physiological human needs are met within and by the neighborhood without the typical large-scale development and land collection required by developers.