Walter M Hosack

The Equations of Urban Design Walter M Hosack

The challenge is to increase the shelter available for population growth while preventing sprawl from consuming our source of life with annexation. In other words, a language is needed to accurately measure, evaluate and predict shelter capacity options for a given land area in order to preserve the remainder as our source of life. Shelter capacity is gross building area per buildable acre, and is produced by six habitable building design categories. This limited number may be a surprise, but shelter classification is not based on building form, function, appearance and internal occupant activity. This has distracted us for centuries. The limited number design categories makes gross building area, shelter capacity and intensity measurement feasible for every acre of natural and agricultural land we consume, and we must begin to take this subtraction seriously. Shelter capacity is determined by a collection of specification value decisions that have remained undocumented and uncorrelated. These value topics are listed in a building category's design specification template. The values are correlated with an architectural algorithm and used by a category master equation to produce gross building area and shelter capacity options per acre. Changing one or more values in the category specification produces a new set of predictions. This becomes significant when we realize that the ability to accurately predict gross building area alternatives to shelter any activity will determine our ability to correlate a growing presence with a planet that is no longer a world without end. Shelter capacity, intensity, intrusion, and dominance can now be managed by correlating the values assigned to the design specification topics that define the six fundamental categories of human shelter formation on the planet. This is the leadership language needed to accurately assess the options available and the decisions needed to protect a human presence that depends on symbiotic solutions for sustainability.