Zoning

Initially introduced in New York in 1916 and quickly spreading to nearly all large American urban areas, zoning is a practice of municipal or county government land segregation according to use, density, building height, and lot size. Zoning is a police power permitting governments the right to refuse permission to use land in ways differing from the zoning code. Zoning is often equated with city and county planning processes but functions differently in reality. Zoning is considered a “negative” tool in that cities only have a right to deny a land use application rather than designating exactly what the property can be used for. Zoning has been studied by political geographers interested in the exercise of governance and by economic geographers interested in the consequences of these laws on land values and economic activity. Zoning has also been extended to classifying and preserving the physical attributes of land on flood plains, steep slopes, and wetlands, and other characteristics. The idea of zoning has also been expanded to consider more generally the spatial isolation of populations or activities by local governments and policing activities.

Discursively, zoning is often tied to the idea of social disorganization and the apparent need to reconstitute order in cities. Such arguments hinge on the assumption that an increasingly complex urban life necessitated the need for “order” and the separation of private dwellings from buildings for commercial and industrial use. Historians of zoning regulations have diverging arguments about the original function of these laws. Some argue that zoning was meant to prevent the encroachment by the lower classes and people of other ethnicities on high-land-value neighborhoods, such as garment workers in New York and Chinese laundries in California. Conversely, other scholars argue that zoning laws were meant to protect the lower classes from the deleterious health effects of industrial production and overcrowding. Whether the original crafters of the American zoning law had socially progressive intentions in mind or not, the discourse of “order” and the desirability of “separation” have been enormously important in shaping public understanding of zoning. “Order” has turned out to mean many things in zoning, from regulating new development to redirecting nearly all capital production to licensed, commercially zoned districts. This discourse continues to inform and justify daily practices of zoning and can be evidenced in much of the research on zoning.

Political geographers have couched zoning in the larger context of governance and used it to reveal power relations and social inequities. Such geographers consider the wider political processes that allow counties and municipalities to use zoning laws to manage behavior through enforcement practices, to enforce state power over privately held property, and to generate spatial data on property. These articulations produce a [Page 3149][Page 3150]legalized and enforceable landscape, dictating what activities citizens can perform and where. Political geographers regard regulatory agencies generally, and zoning particularly, as a way to produce a regulated urban landscape, cultivate legitimacy, and produce governable populations. Some zoning literature focuses on the regulatory enforcement, that is, the multiple ways the state shapes society through local enforcement, ideologies, and policies.

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