Land use and building legislation in Themiclesia

Land use and building legislation in Themiclesia governs the way land may be developed and buildings erected on them in Themiclesia. The country has an extensive history on that subject extending many centuries. Modern topics like zoning and urban planning are covered under this heading.

Medieval laws

Freestanding buildings

An "old" law already existed in the 5th century forbidding the erection of houses that were not freestanding, because understandably such houses would become uninhabitable or at risk of collapse if a building to which it was attached were demolished. Moreover, complex and prolonged litigation usually resulted if a property owner was prevented from demolishing a building he owned merely because it would cause another building, built without his involvement, to collapse. This rule was confirmed no later than 554 that even buildings relying on a wall that did not form another building for support were not acceptable.

Temple and palace vicinities

In addition to the prohibition of various

Citadel precincts and vicinities

Abbatoirs were banned from the city's precincts in 574. The abbatoir was defined as a place of profane slaughter of animals: places where slaughter was carried out for sacramental purposes were permitted. This appears to be connected to a certain place called "Slaughter-bridge" in modern Kien-k'ang, which is attributed to a former bridge crossing a small ford over which animals for slaughter were transported. Such a bridge no longer exists, and no trace has been detected.

Modern laws

In the modern era, new buildings in Themiclesia are subject to multiple regimes of legislations, and it is possible to meet one regime and yet fail to meet another. For example, a house could be built to engineering code but fall afoul of zoning regulation, or it could meet zoning regulation and yet fall short of other building laws that are independent of zoning. There are a number of important laws that were passed before zoning laws existed, and these laws remain in effect.

Side yards

In 1894, an enormous conflagration consumed four districts of Kien-k'ang and killed at least 1,247 people (and very probably many more unaccounted for) and caused over 50,000 to become homeless. The cause of the fire remains mysterious but the manner in which it spread is known. The implicated houses had a fairly uniform two- or three-storey design with brick walls and wooden floors and roofs, with very little space between them. When fire started in the bottom level of a building, it burned through the floor and eventually reached the roof; once the roof caught fire, it leapt to another house as the roof rafters usually extended some distance from the exterior walls and touched each other. Then when the other house's roof collapsed, the fire spread to the lower floors of that house. Overly thin walls buckled under the heat and blocked alleys that could have made escape possible. The process was only accelerated by the high winds of the autumn of 1894, which was unusually dry. The fire burned for four days and only stopped at the wider boulevards that were constructed only several decades earlier in the century.

When money was raised both publicly and privately for the restoration, the Kien-k'ang Council acted to bar overly dense construction. It should be noted that the density of buildings was addressed by the 1894 restoration, not the density of people living in them. Three measures were enacted. First, houses are to have a three-feet setback on shared property lines; thus, assuming both sides are new constructions, there would be a six-feet void between houses. This rule did not affect the side of a house on a non-shared property line, such as a street. Second, houses are not permitted to have projections from their exterior walls such as bay windows, balconies, arcades etc., unless they also meet the setback restrictions. Third, wide boulevards are planned at intervals to act as a final barrier against future fires that break out and spread to nearby houses.

Maximum building height

In 1897, the maximum height of buildings without special permission from the Kien-k'ang Council was set at 84 Themiclesian feet or 21.3 metres. This was calculated to the height of the highest livable floor, not to the full architectural height of the building. Thus, houses could have very tall roofs that resulted in a very spacious storey at the top level, though houses venturing to this height were actually quite rare at the time.