The Center for Applied Transect Studies (CATS) promotes understanding of the built environment as part of the natural environment, through the planning methodology of the rural-to-urban transect. CATS supports interdisciplinary research, publication, tools, and training for the design, coding, building and documentation of resilient transect-based communities.

Practitioners and scholars associated with CATS are committed to transect-based environmental and land development principles that guide and encourage the following outcomes:

• provision, protection and repair of walkable, transit-connected communities, including existing downtowns and first ring suburbs
• comprehensive zoning reform to legalize and protect traditional neighborhood patterns, halt the proliferation of auto-dependent sprawl, and encourage the evolution of single-use areas into towns
• context-based thoroughfare design and engineering for safe and efficient multi-modal transit that includes pedestrian, vehicular, and mass transportation options
• affordable housing and community-based income diversity
• regional, local, and individual food production
• passive climatic response in building and urban design through local patterns and character
• reduction in the environmental impacts and costs of infrastructure
• reduction of waste and harmful emissions as byproducts of human settlement, and the promotion and study of renewable energy technologies.

Second CATS-supported publication, The Smart Growth Manual, has been published.

First major city with a transect-based code for the entire municipality:
Miami 21 zoning ordinance is adopted October 22, 2009.

First CATS-supported publication: The Architecture of Community by Léon Krier

The transect-based model SmartCode wins a 2009 CNU Charter Award