An adaptable zoning proposal for walkable cities
Zoning has a vice grip on the housing market across the country; we need to shift the basic logic underlying zoning to create a lasting shift in the urban housing market and to produce classical patterns of urban development. In spite of ample literature criticizing zoning and describing what good urbanism looks like, we still lack a legal framework that consistently allows for adequate housing production in appropriate locations and nudges existing neighborhoods toward becoming more walkable and vibrant. The effort to dream up and implement alternatives to Euclidean zoning has given us innovative approaches such as form-based codes, performance zoning, New Urbanism, and even state-led efforts to categorically upzone single-family and transit-adjacent neighborhoods. In practice, partly due to cautious adoption by planning commissions and city councils, progress has often come in the form of adding an additional layer of regulation on top of a still mostly-Euclidean zoning code, even while making improvements on architectural guidelines, raising the limits, and expanding the range of allowable uses.
Because contemporary zoning describes the finished state of each neighborhood, it fails to allow cities to grow and adapt over time by locking existing neighborhoods into the awkward legal status of being finished. The project of the city is never finished - the neighborhoods we live in may still be neighborhoods in 100 or 500 years, but there is no reason to expect them to look the same. Yet we enforce a zoning paradigm that is incapable of embracing the kind of incremental growth that makes cities resilient over time. Even our best zoning codes fail to acknowledge the inherently unfinished nature of the city.
Cities are self-organizing, complex systems, and as such the fixed limits of zoning are a poor match for the nature of the system they aim to regulate. In my book, Metrocoalescence: A zoning paradigm for vibrant cities, published April, 2024, an adaptive set of operating principles offer a way out of the Euclidean paradigm and align zoning with contemporary social values and the complex nature of cities. In doing so, these new principles mitigate many of the ways zoning has constrained the housing market and contributed to the current crisis.
One of the central concepts coined in my book is a simple yet far-reaching reframing of the way zoning could be done—called Functional Zoning. It redefines the concept of a “zone” down to the block level and regulates the rate of change based on existing conditions rather than the fixed limits of traditional zoning. This means that the scale and scope of a by-right project is determined as a function of the current intensity of development. As growth takes place on and adjacent to each block, the scale of by-right projects incrementally increases. In the short-term, Functional Zoning would resemble a modest upzoning, but over time, as conditions change, the zoning map would rewrite itself without the need for a complicated political process.
Instead of triggering a public hearing each time a proposed project crosses an arbitrary limit set in advance, Functional Zoning would set the threshold for what constitutes a political question as a function of existing conditions. Projects that propose drastic change would go to public hearing, while those with only a modest impact on existing conditions would be by-right. This change fundamentally alters our relationship to the future. It still protects people from drastic change, but makes incremental change just part of the deal that comes with living in a growing city.
Functional Zoning implemented in combination with an aesthetic methodology described in my book called Vernacular Resonance, would achieve many of the goals underlying Form-Based Code in a way that is less prescriptive and administratively simple. Vernacular Resonance is a point-based system of ensuring that new buildings make some reference to architectures of local historical significance, leaving a great deal of creative license to architects and designers while ensuring that new buildings and developments incorporate some principles of placemaking and incorporate elements of visual interest in conversation with local history.
Metrocoalescence is not limited to urban solutions, but also addresses rural issues. Rural zoning across the country produces rural sprawl because it emphasizes lot size and density as its primary tools. Village-Oriented Development proposes a solution to sprawl and an answer to the question of how to encourage and incentivize patterns of rural development resembling those that were popular at the turn of the 20th Century. Cluster development has been a popular strategy in many parts of the country, and while this can incentivize better subdivision design and the preservation of landscapes and habitats, it does not incentivize complete villages that have the capacity to grow over time. And while a developer could build something like a village in most jurisdictions, the gradual, natural emergence of villages through an incremental, decentralized process is nearly impossible within the confines of most land use codes.
Without the village, the shape of rural life is relegated to bedroom communities committed to driving to cities or strip malls. Villages are the engines of rural economies and the hearts of rural communities, and without them we carve up the very landscape that attracts us to the countryside in the first place. Villages allow us to share resources and infrastructure and to cultivate a local labor market; when done well, they can be a source of great beauty and they make a rugged, rural life just a little easier.
Metrocoalescence is both a philosophy and a template for a new way of zoning that offers a vision for aligning our land use laws with contemporary values. It is a book that gives planners a set of new tools to guide the fragmented urbanism of the last century together, coalescing into a more vibrant and walkable urban future.
