The urban form of cities plays a key role in achieving high-quality urban environments. Recently, Form-Based Code has been gaining popularity and has become a travelling and universal concept. This paper explores the adaptability of FBC as a universal concept to the local socio-cultural context by analysing the Wadi Hanifa Urban Code. Three methods were used to triangulate the sources of data include review of policy documents, semi-structured interviews, and thematic analysis. This paper identifies four key socio-cultural factors that play a significant role in urban and social context of Riyadh: privacy, safety and security, sociability, and architectural character. They play a key role in forming the code at multiple layers, including the transect zoning, regulating plan, and code standards. The process of drafting the code was conducted through a top-down approach with no ‘public engagement’ process, which represents the planning culture and practices in Saudi Arabia. Hence, the adaptation of FBC to the socio-cultural context relied on municipal stakeholders’ and experts’ opinions during workshops and charrettes. However, the paper shows that a hybrid approach to seek public feedback was practiced through the Code Studio, which functioned as a testing phase at a later stage of the code development.

城市的城市形式在实现高质量城市环境中起着关键作用。最近，基于表单的代码已变得越来越流行，并且已经成为一种旅行和通用的概念。本文通过分析《瓦迪·哈尼法城市规范》，探索了作为一个通用概念的FBC对当地社会文化背景的适应性。使用三种方法对数据源进行三角划分，包括政策文件审阅，半结构化访谈和主题分析。本文确定了在利雅得的城市和社会环境中起着重要作用的四个关键的社会文化因素：隐私，安全和保障，社交性和建筑特征。它们在形成多层代码（包括样带分区，监管计划和代码标准）中扮演着关键角色。准则起草过程是通过自上而下的方法进行的，没有“公众参与”过程，它代表了沙特阿拉伯的规划文化和实践。因此，在研讨会和专题讨论会上，FBC适应社会文化环境需要依靠市政利益相关者和专家的意见。但是，本文显示，通过Code Studio可以采用一种寻求公众反馈的混合方法，该方法在代码开发的后期阶段充当测试阶段。