A city’s buildable future is assembled through rules that distribute height, density, volume, exposure, value capacity and risk, but also through the institutional arrangements that determine who may initiate plans, when rights become certain, how long negotiation remains open, and which public objectives survive implementation. European building regulation shows that height and density remain dominant instruments and that efficiency is more consistently prioritised than equity, revealing regulation as a selective grammar of spatial possibility rather than a neutral technical framework (Saakjans, Kaufmann and Hersperger, 2026).
