A planning and development framework for walkable, beautiful, ecologically sound, and economically resilient communities: for new construction, and for redeveloping the places we already have.
Most new development gets built to the minimum a code allows, and most existing places are stuck with infrastructure that was never designed for how people actually want to live. Rosetta Places℠ is a framework for something more deliberate: streets sized for people first, buildings with genuine architectural intent, local economies that can survive tourism and turnover, and ecology treated as a design constraint rather than an afterthought.
It is not a style guide and it is not a nostalgia project. The framework draws on real precedent (Dutch traffic engineering, Amsterdam's biodiversity codes, Barcelona's short-term-rental policy, Houten's street hierarchy) and asks a plain question of each one: does this make a place better to live in, and can it hold up over decades?
The shape of the framework
Each pillar sets criteria for streets, buildings, land use, ecology, and governance alike, distinguishing what applies to new construction from what applies to redeveloping an existing place.
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Streets & Mobility
A four-tier road hierarchy with Dutch safety design and a genuine pedestrian street at the center of every place.
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Land Use & Zoning Logic
Row housing and mixed-use districts as defaults, with a crisp edge between the built place and the land around it.
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Architecture & Beauty
Classical design principles required: not a single mandated style, but genuine intent in how a building meets the street.
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Economic Resilience
Protections against overtourism and short-term-rental displacement, grounded in what Barcelona and Mexico City have already tried.
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Ecology & Land
Nature-inclusive building design, connected green corridors, and room for working farms and urban agriculture.
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Third Places & Community Life
Support for the arts, public space, and the informal, unbudgeted life of a place that no zoning code accounts for.
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Local Stewardship & Governance
Because a beautifully designed place with no plan for who maintains it tends to fail exactly where its designers stopped looking.
The framework is being built in the open, one pillar at a time, and it is not finished. What's here reflects real research (into Dutch street design, Amsterdam biodiversity codes, City Repair's governance work, and more), rather than a finished product being marketed as one.
That's a deliberate choice: a framework this ambitious deserves to be argued with before it's declared done.
Rosetta Places, working draft