History of Zoning

by

Sonia Hirt, Sarah Zibanejadrad Beeson

• LAST MODIFIED: 24 July 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190922467-0099

Introduction

How long the history of zoning seems to us largely depends on how we define zoning. Any walled town in the ancient and medieval world that was protected for defensive purposes was, in a way, “zoned”: the walls divided insiders and their built structures from those on the outside. And if we would take zoning to be a system of regulations governing building practices (but not necessarily regulations that vary by district or zone), we too could point to ancient origins. Arguably, the first laws governing building practices in the world were those in the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1755–1750 BCE). In the early twenty-first century, zoning is understood as a system of government regulations, most often practiced at the level of the community (e.g., city, town, village, or county) that divides the community’s entire territory into districts or “zones,” each with a specific set of rules outlining what can and what cannot be built in this zone. A contemporary example of a zoning district is a multi-family residential zoning district that allows particular housing types alongside essential civic, educational, and cultural institutions. Usually, the regulations pertain to land uses (or functions), as well as the size and height of built structures and the lot area covered by them. Additional regulations may cover site layout, parking, landscaping, streetscaping, and other related issues. So, if we would take the term “zoning” literally—as the division of a community into zones—one could say that zoning is a practice as old as city-building. But if we define zoning in a more contemporary way, as the division of a community into zones, with detailed regulations regarding land use, buildings’ characteristics, lot coverage, and relation to the street and other lots, this type of zoning has been on the rise since the 1870s, with the regulations becoming only more complex over time. Aside from the great variety of zoning and zoning-like regulations throughout history, there is also a great variation among countries. In most countries, zoning is a legal practice embedded in national legal regimes (the United States, where zoning is practiced primarily at the local level via powers granted by state governments, rather than the national government, is an exception here). These legal regimes are grossly different in different nations. Hence, there are very few sources that cover zoning’s history or the present state of zoning in a broad international context. Most of the literature covers a narrow historical period in one country or a small group. Often, the best resources on the evolution of zoning can be found in book-length manuscripts that discuss planning history more generally. In-depth explorations of particular aspects of zoning are typically found either in chapters of edited volumes or in articles in scholarly journals. There are also opportunities to learn about zoning practices in different contexts by reviewing actual zoning ordinances, court cases, or related documents, which are included in various archival collections, including online.

General Reviews

Zoning is a mechanism that aims to organize communities in a way that ostensibly makes them safer, healthier, more orderly, more pleasant, and more efficient. One could say that a rudimentary version of zoning was occasionally practiced in ancient India and China. For instance, the Vedic treatises mandated that different castes reside in buildings of different heights and site positions, whereas the rites of the Zhou dynasty dictated different building forms and colors for different groups and relied on a basic land-use dichotomy of public and private spaces. In ancient Greece, laws in some cities required that the major public buildings (agoras, temples, markets) be located in central locations, which too can be considered a simple type of zoning. In ancient Rome, certain land uses perceived as noxious, such as cemeteries, were zoned-out; i.e., they were prohibited in central areas. Height regulations for certain areas existed in Rome since the times of Emperor Augustus. Then and now, zoning and related regulations have been used to impose hierarchies that exist in society upon the physical structure of communities (e.g., by designating different zones for different classes of people). How zoning is crafted and used in each society depends on the complex economic, political, and cultural conditions that characterize this society at a given moment. Hence, perhaps the best way to delve into the topic is to review those scholarly works that place zoning (or its antecedents) in a broad societal context, even if such works are not focused on zoning alone. The best volumes that cover the history of urban planning, with useful information on the emergence of zoning and zoning-like regulations, include Hall 2014, Vance 1990, and Kostof 1991. Vance and Kostof cover urban history since the ancient world, whereas Hall covers mostly Western urban history since the Industrial Revolution. Another string of works that may be helpful, such as Platt 2004 and Scott 2020, comes from authors who deal with the twentieth century. Books that analyze the international history of building regulations, such as zoning, can be very helpful too, although they are very few. Among them, these stand out: Ben-Joseph 2005, Marshall 2012, Talen 2012, and Hirt 2015. From these and other sources, we learn, for example, that zoning’s antecedents include nuisance laws and building-height limitations that existed not only in the ancient world but also in Renaissance England. There, attempts to control the growth of London, for instance, were linked to attempts to keep poor people from London’s desirable areas—an exclusionary goal of zoning that is, unfortunately, still with us in the early twenty-first century. Many of the early attempts to split cities into zones were attempts to split people by class and race into different parts of town—an approach commonly embraced by the European empires in their colonial possessions. The best volume on the long global history of regulations aiming to segregate people is Nightingale 2012.

• Ben-Joseph, Eran. The Code of the City: Standards and the Hidden Language of Place Making. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

  One of the very few books that focuses on building regulations, zoning, and other design standards in a very broad historical and international context. A delight to read and learn from.

• Hall, Peter. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design since 1880. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2014.

  Another great history book. The chapters on the severe problems of the industrial-age city set the context of why more public regulations in the name of public health and safety were necessary. This book has been continuously updated since its original edition in 1989.

• Hirt, Sonia. Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015.

  DOI: 10.7591/9780801454714

  The book title may be a bit misleading. It leads the reader to believe that it focuses on the US case. But the point of the book is to place the American experience in an international context. What makes American zoning what it is? We learn that American zoning is unusually rigid, especially in protecting areas designated for single-family housing from all other land uses. The book also includes chapters on the origins of regulations controlling land use since ancient times in several countries.

• Kostof, Spiro. The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings through History. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991.

  A magnificent and beautifully illustrated worldwide exploration of the history of urban form and human attempts to shape it through time. Especially useful are those sections that deal with ancient and medieval “planned” (as opposed to “organic”) cities, where we find the origins of modern zoning.

• Marshall, Stephen, ed. Urban Coding and Planning. London: Routledge, 2012.

  This may be the best source on the subject of regulating cities because it focuses on zoning and its precedents internationally, through a long historical perspective (e.g., the book includes chapters on China, Japan, India, Spanish Colonial America, France, England, Scotland, and the United States, among others). The drawback is that like other edited volumes, this collection has difficulty combining the individual cases into a single analytical framework.

• Nightingale, Carl. Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

  DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226580777.001.0001

  By far the most illuminating analysis of racism and regulations internationally. The awards that this book has received are very well-deserved.

• Platt, Rutherford. Land Use and Society: Geography, Law, and Public Policy. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004.

  This book places land-use regulation in a broad historical and sociocultural context, mostly considering the cases of Britain and the United States.

• Scott, James. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020.

  DOI: 10.12987/9780300252989

  A remarkable analysis of why states across the world search to impose order and legibility on cities and societies. The original text dates back to 1998. Most pertinent to the study of zoning are the chapters on cities in the “high-modernist” mid-20th-century period.

• Talen, Emily. City Rules: How Regulations Affect Urban Form. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2012.

  The book makes a strong case for why regulations are key to shaping urban form. It relates mostly to the US experience but includes observations on other settings, especially in historical context.

• Vance, James. The Continuing City: Urban Morphology in Western Civilization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

  DOI: 10.56021/9780801838019

  A majestic and beautifully illustrated volume on the history of urban form and planning in the Western world.