Forthcoming Release: The Type V City

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Author: Jeana Ripple
August 2025
University of Texas Press

How building codes shaped material, social, and environmental landscapes in American cities.

Almost every American city contains neighborhoods dominated by wood frame construction—light, cheap, combustible, and requiring the lowest upfront investment of labor and material in the building industry. Known as a Type V (five) construction in the terminology of building codes, these buildings became ubiquitous in the American urban landscape thanks to the abundance of timber, housing affordability aspirations, and the adoption of a uniform code.

In The Type V City: Codifying Material Inequity in Urban America, Jeana Ripple examines the social and spatial history of building codes and material patterns in five cities—New York, Tampa, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Seattle—to reframe the stories of America’s building priorities, methods, negotiations, and assumptions. By examining the development of building materials and codes alongside the environmental, social, economic, and political context of each city’s development, Ripple reveals previously overlooked connections between the power structures underpinning regulatory evolution and the impacts that lay just beyond the frame of city builders’ priorities. Handsomely illustrated and informed by both archival research and insights enabled by contemporary data analysis, The Type V City critiques the homogenous construction practices underlying US urbanization and raises pointed questions for future generations of data-driven city planners and architects.

"The Type V City exposes how building codes—often seen as neutral safeguards—are, in fact, powerful tools that shape urban inequality. 

Through five American cities, Jeana Ripple uncovers the hidden consequences of material regulations, revealing how policies originally meant to ensure health, safety, and well-being have instead evolved to codify risk, disinvestment, labor exclusion, and environmental vulnerabilities. 

A sharp and compelling analysis of regulatory inertia, this one-of-a-kind book draws much-needed attention to building regulations most of us barely understand—let alone question—and challenges us to recognize their role in shaping social and economic systems while reinforcing political agendas." 

—Aleksandra Jaeschke, University of Texas at Austin, 
author of The Greening of America's Building Codes: Promises and Paradoxes
 

The University of Texas Press is a book and journal publisher—a focal point where the life experiences, insights, and specialized knowledge of writers converge to be disseminated in both print and digital formats. Established in 1950, UT Press has published more than 4,000 books over seven decades. Under the direction of Robert Devens, the Press produces approximately one hundred new books and sixteen journals each year.

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Author

Jeana Ripple is the chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Virginia and the founder and principal of Mir Collective Architects.
 

Table of Contents —

• List of Acronyms 
• Introduction
• Type V Chicago: Durability and Disinvestment
• Type V New York: Saturation and Health
• Type V Philadelphia: Labor and Affordability
• Type V Tampa: Occupancy and Urban Vitality
• Type V Seattle: Adaptive Capacity and Lifespan
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index

The publication of The Type V City was made possible by the support of the Roger Fullington Endowment in Architecture.