9 Oct /13

Zoning

Zoning is an instrument for formally regulating the development of land, and it has been with us for almost exactly a century. The first city to employ zoning was New York. This followed the disputes caused by the Equitable Building in Lower Manhattan, which on completion in 1915 was the largest office building in the world. Inside, it offered an impressive 130,000 square metres of floor space but outside it cast a 7 acre shadow across the city. Protests against this led to the 1916 Zoning Resolution which introduced regulations on how much light and air could be restricted by man-made constructions.

Once New Yorkers won their argument, zoning regulations became a reality across the United States. The tiered skyscrapers common in the 1920s were a result of new building size being legally restricted according to the size of the land they were built on.  While New York’s zoning laws were born of an uncomplicated desire to keep its citizens out of the shade, the origins of similar laws in other parts of the country were sometimes less admirable. In Colorado the zoning regulations were instigated by an organisation which cast its own dark shadow over American life. The KKK controlled the Denver Capitol Hill Improvement Association, and when they imposed restrictions on housing and commercial property in their 1925 zonal law, it was with the intention of keeping neighbourhoods segregated.

Definitive legislation also followed in the United Kingdom in 1947 with the Town and Country Planning Act, in Germany with the Construction Code of 1960 in Australia in 1979 with the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act. Politicians and businesspeople would find that legally defining the rights and obligations of property developers also opened the door to loud and well organised opposition. We’ll pick up the threads of that story with tomorrow’s word, nimby.