Zoning

A Guide for 21st-Century Planning

Elliott Sclar, Bernadette Baird-Zars, Lauren Ames Fischer, Valerie Stahl, Elliott Sclar, Bernadette Baird-Zars, Lauren Ames Fischer, Valerie Stahl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429951251
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Zoning is at once a key technical competency of urban planning practice and a highly politicized regulatory tool. How this contradiction between the technical and political is resolved has wide-reaching implications for urban equity and sustainability, two key concerns of urban planning. Moving beyond critiques of zoning as a regulatory hindrance to local affordability or merely the rulebook that guides urban land use, this textbook takes an institutional approach to zoning, positioning its practice within the larger political, social, and economic conflicts that shape local access for diverse groups across urban space. Foregrounding the historical-institutional setting in which zoning is embedded allows planners to more deeply engage with the equity and sustainability issues related to zoning practice.

By approaching zoning from a social science and planning perspective, this text engages students of urban planning, policy, and design with several key questions relevant to the realities of zoning and land regulation they encounter in practice. Why has the practice of zoning evolved as it has? How do social and economic institutions shape zoning in contemporary practice? How does zoning relate to the other competencies of planning, such as housing and transport? Where and why has zoning, an act of physical land use regulation, replaced social planning? These questions, grounded in examples and cases, will prompt readers to think critically about the potential and limitations of zoning. By reforging the important links between zoning practice and the concerns of the urban planning profession, this text provides a new framework for considering zoning in the 21st century and beyond.

Section III
Zoning in Practice

9
Zoning as a Verb

A Scaffolding for the Practice of Land Use Planning

Bernadette Baird-Zars

Why Start With Practice?

Zoning is undeniably messy. Nearly all cases of zoning as a tool for planners reference the challenges and complexity of practice and politics. If how things happen rather than how they should happen is what planners care about, it makes sense to explicitly examine planning and zoning as they actually occur. The scaffolding of zoning practices outlined in this chapter provides an initial provocation and framework to conceptualize and classify practice as an expected and endogenous component of zoning. The scaffolding relies on and advances two propositions. First, understanding zoning as an assembly of institutions that people pay attention to, the “working rules” can open the door to identifying meaningful opportunities for short and long-term intervention. Second, zoning practice may be messy but is not amorphous: working rules often leave clear “forensic” traces that can be systematically analyzed. These traces, discussed in the examples featured in the scaffolding, aim to illustrate how both these propositions can help understandings of land use connect with real-world processes and consequences. This argument continues a small yet robust tradition in planning and legal analyses that foregrounds practice and implementation in the study of zoning (e.g., Alterman & Hill, 1978; Kayden, 2016).¹

Here, zoning practice designates the daily actions of planning and zoning as they are actually done, beyond the aspirations of laws and maps. The norms of zoning practice become visible through a wide array of mechanisms and evidence, such as informal lists, patternings in land use decisions, the words used to describe density, the micro-politics of public meetings, and standing luncheons of developer networks (Ray, Baird-Zars & Sclar, this volume; Stahl, this volume). Although often used interchangeably, this chapter refers to implementation as the deliberate design of practices of networks and organizations, often embodied through future-oriented procedural documents such as action plans, timelines, and work assignments. Descriptions of how zoning practice engages with codes, maps, and implementation plans often invoke the words informal, ad hoc, and incremental. In this chapter, informal zoning actions designate those operating outside of legal regulation, ad hoc zoning decisions occur in a temporary framework with little expectation of permanence, and incremental zoning change occurs through gradual shifts in existing formal pathways.

Framing zoning as an assembly of institutions helps sharpen the lenses of a practice-driven orientation. Institutions, by definition, shape planning dynamics that we care about—in this case land use processes and changes—and are embedded in societal practices (see Singerman Ray, Baird-Zars and Sclar this volume). The institutions of zoning, like planning, are enmeshed in values and normative goals for cities and society (Fischler, 2016). Seen this way, change that matters will always come through institutions, that are living “working rules”; the norms, networks, laws, and rules of thumb that people pay attention to (Ostrom, 1990, p. 51). As such, zoning can only become zoning practice through connections and collisions in the broader landscape of inherited politics, networks, norms, and established rules of thumb about land use (Sorensen, 2015, 2018; Healey, 2007; Hirt, 2014, p. 179).

Practice-based interventions ideally engage with long and short-term shifts in zoning simultaneously.² An institutional frame can help planning projects do both and move beyond the perception that moments of opportunity for normative action are unique and discrete “windows” enabled by a lucky alignment of circumstances and captured by entrepreneurial individuals (Kingdon & Thurber, 1984). Identifying and acting in these moments is arguably a central skill for practicing planners who seek to align zoning practice with progressive values (Forester, 1989; Lake, 2014).³ Yet, arguably, zoning action can be most meaningful when it can relate to, and shift, the larger patterns of how things are done: institutions (Healey, 2007, 2018). Naming these patterns, through mapping the resilient web of working rules that weave through zoning, allows planners to meaningfully act towards more just outcomes (Salet, 2018; see Ray et al., this volume).

Foregrounding zoning as practice also helps locate how zoning intersects with larger shifts in society, by materially reinforcing economic systems or perpetuating identity-based exclusion (Fischler, 1998; Christopher, 1997; Whittemore, this volume). As part of the “dark side” of planning, zoning is frequently one of many technical tools deployed by privileged groups to enforce spatial segregation (Yiftachel, 1998, 2009; Bou Akar, 2018). In other words, embedded networks—and temporary alliances—construct and contest the rationalities of land use decisions, and the success of a given proposal depends on the strength and commitment of the network (Flyvbjerg, 1998). Unpacking the components of practice, the how of exclusionary capture in zoning, can clarify the moments and processes by which capture happens—and the potential spaces for reform.

Starting with practice also draws from an important strand of recent scholarship in planning and the social sciences arguing for a “Southern” perspective (Connell, 2007; Watson, 2009). Rooted in cities where formal rules and governments are weaker, planning scholars have, over decades, worked from assumptions of heterogeneity and context-dependence to identify the “contingent universals” of dynamics driving practice (Watson, 2016; Healey, 2012), sketching, for example, the fuzzy boundaries of the state and so challenging binaries such as formality/informality (e.g., Roy, 2009). This practice-based orientation applies beyond cities of the global South, however. Analyses of the “North” increasingly incorporate these lenses and assume context-dependence of practice inside and outside the state, such as when newcomers, planners and zoning officials themselves can bend and change the rules to influence the shape of the city (Miraftab, 2012; Mukhija & Loukaitou-Sideris, 2015; Devlin, 2017).

Practice Across the Zoning Process: From Degrees of Deviance to Spaces of Maneuver

This chapter sketches out a scaffolding that identifies critical components of zoning practice in four categories (Table 9.1). By intentionally labeling and classifying components of zoning-as-it-happens, the typology aims to provoke more explicit engagement with zoning practice as the starting point, not the conclusion of analyses. In other words, labeling common elements of zoning practice can help planners identify and describe the critical grammars of action (Fawaz, 2017a). The framework of zoning practice here will not fit or describe every place. Instead, it is intended as a provocation, a set of descriptors that aim to take the next step beyond the specific vocabularies describing cases to a shared point of departure.

One way to see practice is as “degrees of deviance”: the divergence of built form from zoning maps and the contradictions between zoning maps and comprehensive plans. But dichotomies of legal/illegal and formal/informal (e.g., North, 1990; Feige, 1990) often oversimplify reality to adherence to legal rules; more exciting analyses trace how many land and urban practices weave through these binaries and their intermediate spaces (Durst & Wegman, 2017). As a result, the distance between plans, values, objectives, and the realities of the built and social environment is the point of departure for this chapter. Instead of framing the plan–action gap as deviance, this chapter starts by assuming practice is an ongoing remixing of institutions and context. To identify a typology of mechanisms driving practice, with a focus on government and political practices, the chapter builds on a tradition of scholarship on practice that “works up from the facts” rather than down from the “should bes” (Flyvbjerg, 1998).

These “facts” can include the materiality of actual buildings built, stalled, or prevented from construction; their heights and uses; decisions made; documentation of backroom networks and stable formal alliances; and the discourses people use about zoning. For example, the tangible paper detritus—the forms, receipts, notes on the margins of cadaster maps—of zoning and land use actions has been documented to “speak” powerfully to describe

Figure 9.1 The point of encounter: preparing paperwork for the municipality of Tlajomulco, (Mexico), July 2018

Source: Bernadette Baird-Zars, 2018.

Table 9.1 A Scaffolding of Zoning Practice

processes and illuminate the role of expertise, whether in Queens, rural Pakistan, or Mosul under Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Beauregard, 2015; Hull, 2012; Callimachi, 2018). Material documents, just like decisions and discourses and buildings, are socially sustained creations Including critical ways to understand this type of urban “forensic” evidence and institutions will help identify how they reinforce and reproduce long-lasting patterns in zoning practice (Weizman, 2017; Baird-Zars, 2018b).

Although the typology of practices within zoning below draws from a wide assembly of case studies, the categories here will almost certainly not map exactly to all cities or situations. Instead, this initial scaffolding aims to identify important spaces and frequent attributes of practice, as well as flag the larger questions where structural fairness could be improved (see Ray et al., this volume). The broader goal of these questions is to highlight where existing practices frequently embed in institutional pathways, biases, and exclusionary patterns. A deliberate charting of the relevant practices can help planners more adeptly locate the “spaces of maneuver” where they can better leverage the mechanisms at play to reduce problematic biases and advance a more just zoning and land use system.

1. Practice as Power in Context: Zoning’s Relevance and Relationships

Identifying current patterns of practice and the opportunities for change depends on how zoning operates within the larger context of planning and development. Mapping out the institutions of zoning at a given place and time is a critical step to identify how zoning operates and where to meaningfully intervene (Ray et al., this volume). For many cities, zoning is a powerful and underexamined force shaping growth in cities. Yet the actual impacts of zoning may be minimal in some contexts, because of the weakness of formal regulations or the broader context of governance.

Mechanisms of Zoning Practice: Power and Embeddedness

Formal zoning is often …

• Nonexistent: No local power to zone, or no land use plan has been made yet.
• Weak: local land use laws have little legal power; state laws or building codes take precedence.
• Irrelevant: other regulations and institutions, such as strategic plan instruments or housing subsidy agencies, matter more.
• Captured: embedded networks of social and economic privilege, bypass, or shape zoning.

At one extreme, many localities do not have official land use plans at all, often compounding unwanted development in marginalized places facing urbanization or resource extraction pressures. Across decentralizing areas of the global South, many of these zoning-less areas are located in peripheral municipalities that experience some of the most rapid construction and urbanization and are often poorer and with weaker administrations. At least one fifth of Mexican urban municipalities had no land use plans as of the mid-2000s (Grindle, 2009). In Monterrey and Guadalajara, peri-urban municipalities with no land use regulations in place often also have less socioeconomic and civic power to organize planning efforts. In rural Argentina, a lack of local zoning corresponds with greater deforestation (Nolte et al., 2017). In a Pennsylvania county under pressure to “frack” natural gas, only 6 of 40 municipalities have zoning codes; the remaining 34 had no tools to direct industrial activities (Colaneri, 2014). Around the world, many more localities have zoning plans that are functionally toothless: they have been permanently shelved, date from many decades prior, are held secretly, or do not cover the areas of the metropolitan area that are growing.⁴

For places with land regulations, zoning practice responds to a wide array of legal mandates. Zoning regulations are but one of many institutions governing property (Imrie & Street, 2009). In some jurisdictions, the local law governing the construction of buildings may be de facto zoning as a powerful element governing the shape, usage, and siting of structures. France’s national building code is one example; Abu Dhabi’s building code and the new Estidama “green” regulatory layer is another (Healey & Williams, 1993). In other contexts, province- or state-level regulations may more meaningfully shape action than municipal zoning. In the US, in the “quiet revolution” in land use, local planners actually petitioned for state control over environmental concerns in land use, hoping they would hold more firm against unsustainable sprawl (Bosselman & Callies, 1972; see Watson, this volume). For instance, in Massachusetts, state permitting requirements on wetland areas (1972) and density for affordable housing “40B” (1969) continue to be meaningful legal elements shaping the location, type, and amoun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Contributor Bios
• Acknowledgments
• Opening Essay: Is Zoning the Answer? What’s the Question?
• SECTION I Zoning in Context
• SECTION II Zoning in Planning
• SECTION III Zoning in Practice
• Index