“Form or code, which comes first? – a methodology on how to study spatial typologies to investigate and improve land development and planning standards. Case study: Albania”

Decision-making processes in the city and territorial planning realm have continuously led professionals towards the challenge of drafting land management and control instruments, which will thoroughly influence how the process of urban growth will take place. This challenge is unfolded into two main issues: will the instruments/indicators be realistic enough for the urbanization context we live in? Are they valid in terms of improvement of liveability conditions and if so, is this measurable? These questions are even more difficult to answer in the Balkan region, where planning cultures and traditions are changing rapidly, in parallel with the Europeanization and globalisation processes. Taking into consideration the wide array of planning instruments used in European countries, this research focuses on countries of the Balkan region, which implement zoning and form based codes as their main planning and development instrument. This research argues that the best way to approach these complex cases, when deciding on normativity and planning/development indicators, is the study of spatial typologies. Thus, this paper presents a methodology on how to study complex spatial typologies, and the respective development parameters of them. The research distinguishes between 2 types of indicators: Development Indicators, which control development at lot level or zone level (e.g. existing and proposed FAR, density, coverage, etc.), and Planning Indicators, which secure liveability in city/municipal level (green area standards, distribution of health-care and educational facilities, etc.). In this paper, 27 samples of spatial typologies have been studied in 5 municipalities in Albania, to understand which indicators are realistic, which standards can be proposed, and what patterns of correlations between typologies and existing development indicators can be found. The proposed methodology is replicable in other cases, similar to the Albanian context, where zoning and similar instruments take place. This research sheds some light on to the ongoing discussion of normativity in city planning, and on the relation between coding (application of norms/standards) and space in today’s post-modern realities.