How Zoning Can Hurt Urban Form
Zoning. When you hear that word you may not feel anything. Many of us go about our lives without giving zoning much thought, even though it can be one of the biggest shapers of our cities, and as a result, our lives.
In most cities around the United States, zoning tells us where we can live, work, and play. It controls the location and form of commercial, industrial, and residential interests.
Without going into too much zoning history (you’re probably somewhat familiar), traditional zoning was created to make cities healthier and safer. In the early 20th century, cities were plagued with overcrowding, pollution, and a mishmash of unsafe buildings jammed into urban areas.
Though zoning helped facilitate quiet residential streets and separated children from factory smoke, it also sprawled out our cities and made it difficult to get anywhere by walking.
Zoning has been criticized as a tool that has hurt urban form because of its tendency to separate uses. In many municipalities, single family homes were separated from retail uses, office uses, and other commercial uses.
Other land uses such as industrial factories and manufacturing plants were located away from any area where people lived, meaning that long commutes for workers soon became the norm.
Soon, our cities were filled with huge highways and neighborhoods lost much of the vibrancy they once possessed. The country wrecked dense, culturally diverse neighborhoods to build huge roads and interstates, all to facilitate the new suburbs.
Over the next few decades, people would begin commuting in droves in shiny new cars, and any urban form that American cities had was lost.
From Separate Use to Mixed Use
A hundred years ago, there were many advantages to separating uses, especially at a time when industry and commerce was largely a dirty, ugly affair, filling streets with acrid smoke and noxious smells.
You can imagine how people wanted to get away from all that. You can watch movies like Gangs of New York (Fictional but somewhat accurate) to get an idea of the filth and chaos of urban life in that time.
The Zoning code gave us separate neighborhoods for families, keeping them separate from all the busyness and confusion of the city. Once highways came, it was the perfect storm of separate-use zoning code and cheap transportation, causing people to move to “bedroom communities” miles and miles away from work and leisure.
Now that the United States is largely not a manufacturing country, though, the reasons for this type of traditional zoning are becoming increasingly irrelevant. That’s why a shift towards mixed-use and form-based codes are inevitable, as we try to reclaim the urban form we lost in the last century.
Traditional zoning has also hurt urban form by creating cities that are not walkable for the average person and often require cars to get around in.
The reliance on cars, highways, and copious amounts of parking has created air pollution and sprawling, unattractive cities. Any idea of an area’s urban form, whether aesthetic or functional, has been lost because of traditional zoning’s insistence on separating uses.
Another issue with zoning is that it may perpetuate social and economic segregation. One way that municipalities have done this is by mandating a minimum lot size for a neighborhood or area of the city.
Since larger lots are pricier and often feature larger homes, people of a lower economic status (and often of a different race) are often excluded from the area. This sort of economic segregation is also put into effect by only allowing single-family homes in an area, thus reducing the ability for affordable housing to be located there.
Tools can be utilized in zoning to overcome economic and racial segregation. Cities such as Minneapolis have banned single-family zoning, for example, thus making it easier for multi-unit housing to be built in any neighborhood. This may make the area able to be occupied by people of various economic degrees to buy and rent housing there.
For a video explaining the shift in Minneapolis:
Variances and Special Use Permits: One way to encourage mixed-use
Variances have been a simple way for municipalities to accommodate other uses not included in a property’s zoning code. This has allowed for a fair degree of flexibility in land use, allowing cities to grow more organically than if there was only a strict zoning code defining development. Special use permits have functioned in a very similar way.
The problems with the use of variances and special use permits is that there often isn’t a lot of oversight to how the government issues these to property owners. Variances, for example, are not reviewed by the Planning Commission nor approved by the governing body, which is why some states have forbidden them.
Special use permits can also be issued with vague standards about whether or not these special land uses are in the public interest and do not harm the character of the neighborhood.
Form-Based Zoning Codes: The Solution?
Part of the shift towards multi-use zoning has included something called form-based zoning codes.
Essentially, form-based codes influence our urban areas by instituting a stricter urban form on development in an area. It fosters predictable results by using a specific physical form (rather than a separation of uses) as the way that the zoning code is organized and used to influence development.
Form-based codes are regulations and not guidelines, meaning that developers have to comply with them. In fact, many developers have embraced form-based codes and used them as selling points for mixed-use neighborhoods.
The next few decades in urban planning will probably be defined by a new approach to urban form. American cities want to rediscover an urban form that was lost over the last century, and new ways of imagining and organizing our zoning code will be essential in creating new places for us to live, work, and play.