Arbitrary Lines

Arbitrary Lines PDF Author: M. Nolan Gray
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1642832553
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
What if scrapping one flawed policy could bring US cities closer to addressing debilitating housing shortages, stunted growth and innovation, persistent racial and economic segregation, and car-dependent development? It’s time for America to move beyond zoning, argues city planner M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. With lively explanations and stories, Gray shows why zoning abolition is a necessary—if not sufficient—condition for building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. The arbitrary lines of zoning maps across the country have come to dictate where Americans may live and work, forcing cities into a pattern of growth that is segregated and sprawling. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Reform is in the air, with cities and states across the country critically reevaluating zoning. In cities as diverse as Minneapolis, Fayetteville, and Hartford, the key pillars of zoning are under fire, with apartment bans being scrapped, minimum lot sizes dropping, and off-street parking requirements disappearing altogether. Some American cities—including Houston, America’s fourth-largest city—already make land-use planning work without zoning. In Arbitrary Lines, Gray lays the groundwork for this ambitious cause by clearing up common confusions and myths about how American cities regulate growth and examining the major contemporary critiques of zoning. Gray sets out some of the efforts currently underway to reform zoning and charts how land-use regulation might work in the post-zoning American city. Despite mounting interest, no single book has pulled these threads together for a popular audience. In Arbitrary Lines, Gray fills this gap by showing how zoning has failed to address even our most basic concerns about urban growth over the past century, and how we can think about a new way of planning a more affordable, prosperous, equitable, and sustainable American city.

Arbitrary Lines

Arbitrary Lines PDF Author: M. Nolan Gray
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1642832553
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
What if scrapping one flawed policy could bring US cities closer to addressing debilitating housing shortages, stunted growth and innovation, persistent racial and economic segregation, and car-dependent development? It’s time for America to move beyond zoning, argues city planner M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. With lively explanations and stories, Gray shows why zoning abolition is a necessary—if not sufficient—condition for building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. The arbitrary lines of zoning maps across the country have come to dictate where Americans may live and work, forcing cities into a pattern of growth that is segregated and sprawling. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Reform is in the air, with cities and states across the country critically reevaluating zoning. In cities as diverse as Minneapolis, Fayetteville, and Hartford, the key pillars of zoning are under fire, with apartment bans being scrapped, minimum lot sizes dropping, and off-street parking requirements disappearing altogether. Some American cities—including Houston, America’s fourth-largest city—already make land-use planning work without zoning. In Arbitrary Lines, Gray lays the groundwork for this ambitious cause by clearing up common confusions and myths about how American cities regulate growth and examining the major contemporary critiques of zoning. Gray sets out some of the efforts currently underway to reform zoning and charts how land-use regulation might work in the post-zoning American city. Despite mounting interest, no single book has pulled these threads together for a popular audience. In Arbitrary Lines, Gray fills this gap by showing how zoning has failed to address even our most basic concerns about urban growth over the past century, and how we can think about a new way of planning a more affordable, prosperous, equitable, and sustainable American city.

Boston Zoning

Boston Zoning PDF Author: Cynthia M. Barr
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781683452751
Category : Zoning law
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Zoning for Downtown Urban Design

Zoning for Downtown Urban Design PDF Author: Robert S. Cook
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description


Innovative Zoning

Innovative Zoning PDF Author: Rahenkamp, Sachs, Wells, and Associates
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Zoning
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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A Better Way to Zone

A Better Way to Zone PDF Author: Donald L. Elliott
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610910559
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Nearly all large American cities rely on zoning to regulate land use. According to Donald L. Elliott, however, zoning often discourages the very development that bigger cities need and want. In fact, Elliott thinks that zoning has become so complex that it is often dysfunctional and in desperate need of an overhaul. A Better Way to Zone explains precisely what has gone wrong and how it can be fixed. A Better Way to Zone explores the constitutional and legal framework of zoning, its evolution over the course of the twentieth century, the reasons behind major reform efforts of the past, and the adverse impacts of most current city zoning systems. To unravel what has gone wrong, Elliott identifies several assumptions behind early zoning that no longer hold true, four new land use drivers that have emerged since zoning began, and basic elements of good urban governance that are violated by prevailing forms of zoning. With insight and clarity, Elliott then identifies ten sound principles for change that would avoid these mistakes, produce more livable cities, and make zoning simpler to understand and use. He also proposes five practical steps to get started on the road to zoning reform. While recent discussion of zoning has focused on how cities should look, A Better Way to Zone does not follow that trend. Although New Urbanist tools, form-based zoning, and the SmartCode are making headlines both within and outside the planning profession, Elliott believes that each has limitations as a general approach to big city zoning. While all three trends include innovations that the profession badly needs, they are sometimes misapplied to situations where they do not work well. In contrast, A Better Way to Zone provides a vision of the future of zoning that is not tied to a particular picture of how cities should look, but is instead based on how cities should operate.

Planning and Zoning New York City

Planning and Zoning New York City PDF Author: Todd Bressi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000948196
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Two unique events shaped the magnificent unnatural geography of New York City and created its sense of place: the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 and the zoning resolution of 1916. The first imprinted Manhattan with a two-dimensional plan, a rectangular grid defined by broad north-south avenues, multiple east-west cross streets, and by its standard units: blocks of two hundred feet by six hundred to eight hundred feet. The second determined the city's three-dimensional form by restricting uses by district, by limiting the maximum mass of a building allowed on a given site.This book addresses the fundamental challenge facing every American municipality: Can zoning - the basic tool of municipal land-use control - balance growth and equity? As New York plans for the future, the nation's foremost commentators on urban planning, architecture, land-use law, and design discuss the accomplishments of New York's zoning laws and explore alternative scenarios for guiding the city's future development.The chapters in this book were originally prepared for a symposium on the history and future of planning in New York City. The authors provide a skillful blend of urban history, architectural review, economic analysis, and social commentary. Contributors include such experts as Jonathan Barnett, Sigurd Grava, Frances Halsband, Jerold Kayden, Brian Kintish, Eric Kober, Michael Kwartler, Larry Littlefield, Norman Marcus, R. Susan Motley, Richard A. Plunz, Peter D. Salins, Richard L. Schaffer, John Shapiro, Robert A. M. Stern, Roy Strickland, Marilyn Taylor, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., and Carol Willis. This book is essential reading for planners, architects, historians, developers, and municipal officials concerned with guiding the future of America's cities. Its lessons are vital for every city in America.

City Rules

City Rules PDF Author: Emily Talen
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610911768
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
City Rules offers a challenge to students and professionals in urban planning, design, and policy to change the rules of city-building, using regulations to reinvigorate, rather than stifle, our communities. Emily Talen demonstrates that regulations are a primary detriment to the creation of a desirable urban form. While many contemporary codes encourage sprawl and even urban blight, that hasn't always been the case-and it shouldn't be in the future. Talen provides a visually rich history, showing how certain eras used rules to produce beautiful, walkable, and sustainable communities, while others created just the opposite. She makes complex regulations understandable, demystifying city rules like zoning and illustrating how written codes translate into real-world consequences. Most importantly, Talen proposes changes to these rules that will actually enhance communities' freedom to develop unique spaces.

Zoning

Zoning PDF Author: Elliott Sclar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429951256
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
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.

Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World

Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World PDF Author: Sara C. Bronin
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393881679
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
An eye-opening exploration of one of the little-known levers that controls our world—zoning codes—and a call-to-arms for using them to improve American society at every level. Zoning codes dictate how and where we can build housing, factories, restaurants, and parks. They limit how tall buildings can be and where trees can be planted. They have become the most significant regulatory power of local government, ultimately determining how we experience our cities. Yet zoning remains invisible. In Key to the City, legal scholar and architect Sara C. Bronin examines how zoning became such a prevailing force and reveals its impact—and its potential for good. Outdated zoning codes have maintained racial segregation, prioritized cars over people, and enabled great ecological harm. But, as Bronin argues, once we recognize the power of zoning, we can harness it to create the communities we desire, and deserve. Drawing on her own experience leading the overhaul of Hartford’s zoning code and exploring the efforts of activists and city planners across the country, Bronin shows how new codes are reshaping our cities—from Baltimore to Chicago, Las Vegas to Minneapolis, and beyond. In Boston, a law fought for by a passionate group of organizers, farmers, and beekeepers is transforming the city into a haven for urban farming. In Tucson, zoning codes are mitigating the impacts of climate change and drought-proofing neighborhoods in peril. In Delray Beach, Florida, a new code aims to capture and maintain the town’s colorful spirit through its architecture. With clarity and insight, Bronin demystifies the power of an inscrutable organizing force in our lives and invites us to see zoning as a revolutionary vehicle for change. In Key to the City, she puts forward a practical and energizing vision for how we can reimagine our communities.

Strong Towns

Strong Towns PDF Author: Charles L. Marohn, Jr.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119564816
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
A new way forward for sustainable quality of life in cities of all sizes Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem. Inside, you’ll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial struggles—and why it just doesn’t work. New development and high-risk investing don’t generate enough wealth to support itself, and cities continue to struggle. Read this book to find out how cities large and small can focus on bottom-up investments to minimize risk and maximize their ability to strengthen the community financially and improve citizens’ quality of life. Develop in-depth knowledge of the underlying logic behind the “traditional” search for never-ending urban growth Learn practical solutions for ameliorating financial struggles through low-risk investment and a grassroots focus Gain insights and tools that can stop the vicious cycle of budget shortfalls and unexpected downturns Become a part of the Strong Towns revolution by shifting the focus away from top-down growth toward rebuilding American prosperity Strong Towns acknowledges that there is a problem with the American approach to growth and shows community leaders a new way forward. The Strong Towns response is a revolution in how we assemble the places we live.