This is another version of a senior college class - this time it's just about zoning - April 2014 - a history of land use regulation/zoning from the early regulations from the Law of Indies to modern day local government in the United States - the background shading didn't transfer well to this program, so sorry some of the photos are darker than they are on my computer!
Water and peace go hand-in hand. World Water Day 2024
How did land use zoning come about?
1. Anne Krieg, AICP
Bridgton Director of
Planning, Economic &
Community Development
Zoning, Development and
regulations at the local level
2. Early Urban form
• Religious, political and
military hierarchy
• Planning for the elite in society
• Wall and the citadel
• Temple & public districts
• Laws of the Indies 1573
8. Law of Indies 1573
• Site plan of Santiago de Leon [present-day
Caracas, Venezuela]
• King Phillip II approved city plans
• Set out city planning ordinances
• Lot sizes – Peonia, caballeria
• Main plaza sizing
9. Early zoning in the United States
Ordinance of 1785
5th
Amendment
11. Urban Public Health as a Focus of Concern
and the Beginnings of Regulation
The Industrial City grew from
the Early Urban Settlement
1855 The London physician John Snow publishes his map of the
cholera outbreak in Soho
12. The Birth of Land use Zoning
1886 statutes: San Francisco
1896 United States v.
Gettysburg Electric Railway
Co.
13. Turn of the Century Zoning
1901 New York State Tenement Housing Act
1906 Antiquities Act of 1906
1907 the first city planning commission
established
1st
NY zoning law (1916)
14. And then the feds got
involved
1924 U.S. Dept.
of Commerce
issues a
Standard State
Zoning Enabling
Act
1926
Village of
Euclid vs.
Ambler
Realty
17. Zoning in the
60’s takes a
turn in a new
direction
More public
involvement
1963
destruction of
Penn Station
NEPA
18. The 70’s
• California passes the Coastal
Zone Management
• Southern Burlington County
N.A.A.C.P. v. Mount Laurel
Township
19. The 80’s
• Construction
of Seaside,
• 1987 First
English
Evangelical
Lutheran
Church v.
County of Los
Angeles
• 1987 Nollan
Vs. California
Coastal
Commission
20. The 90’s
• 1992 Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council
• 1994 Dolan v. City of Tigard
21. More recent happenings in
zoning• 2005 The US Supreme Court
rules in favor of eminent
domain authority in the case
Kelo v. City of New London
• Political shifts against zoning
• Form based codes
22. sources
• National Association of Olmsted Parks:
http://www.olmsted.org/pages/philosophy.htm
• Cornell University: REMARKS OF THE
COMMISSIONERS FOR LAYING OUT STREETS
AND ROADS IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK,
UNDER THE ACT OF APRIL 3, 1807 William
Bridges, Map Of The City Of New York And
Island Of Manhattan With Explanatory
Remarks And References. New York: William
Bridges, 1811
• Encyclopedia of San Francisco
• Urban Planning 540: Planning Theory
Prof. Scott Campbell University Of Michigan
• World Commission on Environment and
Development. 1987. From One Earth to One
World: An Overview. Oxford: Oxford
University Press
• APA's "100 Essential Books of Planning
• History Of Cities And City Planning By Cliff
Ellis
• Mark Damen USU
• Casebriefs.com
• William A. Fischel Dartmouth College
Department of Economics
• My memory
volution of Urban Form
The first true urban settlements appeared around 3,000 B.C. in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley. Ancient cities displayed both "organic" and "planned" types of urban form. These societies had elaborate religious, political, and military hierarchies. Precincts devoted to the activities of the elite were often highly planned and regular in form. In contrast, residential areas often grew by a slow process of accretion, producing complex, irregular patterns that we term "organic." Two typical features of the ancient city are the wall and the citadel: the wall for defense in regions periodically swept by conquering armies, and the citadel -- a large, elevated precinct within the city -- devoted to religious and state functions. Greek cities did not follow a single pattern. Cities growing slowly from old villages often had an irregular, organic form, adapting gradually to the accidents of topography and history. Colonial cities, however, were planned prior to settlement using the grid system. The grid is easy to lay out, easy to comprehend, and divides urban land into uniform rectangular lots suitable for development.
The Romans engaged in extensive city-building activities as they consolidated their empire. Rome itself displayed the informal complexity created by centuries of organic growth, although particular temple and public districts were highly planned. In contrast, the Roman military and colonial towns were laid out in a variation of the grid. Many European cities, like London and Paris, sprang from these Roman origins.
We usually associate medieval cities with narrow winding streets converging on a market square with a cathedral and city hall. Many cities of this period display this pattern, the product of thousands of incremental additions to the urban fabric. However, new towns seeded throughout undeveloped regions of Europe were based upon the familiar grid. In either case, large encircling walls were built for defense against marauding armies; new walls enclosing more land were built as the city expanded and outgrew its former container.
During the Renaissance, architects began to systematically study the shaping of urban space, as though the city itself were a piece of architecture that could be given an aesthetically pleasing and functional order. Many of the great public spaces of Rome and other Italian cities date from this era. Parts of old cities were rebuilt to create elegant squares, long street vistas, and symmetrical building arrangements. Responding to advances in firearms during the fifteenth century, new city walls were designed with large earthworks to deflect artillery, and star-shaped points to provide defenders with sweeping lines of fire. Spanish colonial cities in the New World were built according to rules codified in the Laws of the Indies of 1573, specifying an orderly grid of streets with a central plaza, defensive wall, and uniform building style.
We associate the baroque city with the emergence of great nation-states between 1600 and 1750. Ambitious monarchs constructed new palaces, courts, and bureaucratic offices. The grand scale was sought in urban public spaces: long avenues, radial street networks, monumental squares, geometric parks and gardens. Versailles is a clear expression of this city-building model; Washington, D.C. is an example from the United States. Baroque principles of urban design were used by Baron Haussmann in his celebrated restructuring of Paris between 1853 and 1870. Haussmann carved broad new thoroughfares through the tangled web of old Parisian streets, linking major subcenters of the city with one another in a pattern which has served as a model for many other modernization plans.
Take existing health conditions under consideration for settlement locations – people, climate animals and plants
Good access to sea, passable rivers and land – but watch for pirates
Drinking water abundance
Medium elevations – limit winds, north and south best,
Government structure was set up
First locate houses, then pastures, then a lot for the person in charge and lots for “neighbors, which were children and relatives of the settlers – planned for growth!
Peonia – 46x92 set by yeild of crops and animals
Caballeria – 92x184 larger yield
Clearly marked and surveyed
Owners must accept terms of production of food
Main plaza is start of the town, sized in proportion to population, min 200x300 max 800x535 – preference was 600x400
4 principla streets, portals off the corners for merchants
Streets are wide in coler and windy places and narrow in hot places
Plan streets to allow for expansion
Dirty uses like slaughterhouses and fisheries located so waste can be removed easily
Hospital located near where the north wind blows but enjoys the south wind
Taxes levied to help pay to build temples hospitals and royal places
Commons large enough to expand with populatio and allow for recreation
Settlements
Ordinance of 1785. Provided for the rectangular land survey of the Old Northwest. The rectangular survey has been called "the largest single act of national planning in our history and ... the most significant in terms of continuing impact on the body politic" (Daniel Elazar).
1791 Pierre L.Enfant plans the capital of the United States
1825Erie Canal completed. This artificial waterway connected the northeastern states with the newly settled areas of what was then the West, facilitating the economic development of both regions
1902
the McMillan Plan for Washington, D.C., redesigning the National Mall, in City Beautiful style
The Ordinance of 1785 provided for the scientific surveying of the territory’s lands and for a systematic subdivision of them. Land was to be subdivided according to a rectangular grid system; the basic unit of land grant was the township, which was a square area measuring six miles on each side. A township could then be subdivided into a number of rectangular parcels of individually owned land. The minimum land sale was set at one square mile (640 acres), and the minimum price per acre was one dollar. One section in each township was to be set aside for a school. These procedures formed the basis of American public land policy until the Homestead Act of 1862.
Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.
The government cannot force citizens to house soldiers in their homes.
The Founders brought with them a legacy of guarding their homes against what they saw as unreasonable and tyrannical intrusion. The Petition of Right and the English Bill of Rights both make reference to quartering troops. In the Declaration of Independence the Founders charged the British King with “quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.”
The Supreme Court has never directly addressed the meaning of the Third Amendment. However, in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) the Court cited the Third Amendment as one part of the Bill of Rights that evidences “zones of privacy” and a constitutional right to privacy.
nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
1811 Commissioners' Plan establishes the street grid pattern for New York City (i.e., "the greatest grid")
1842 Croton Aqueduct begins supplying water from Westchester County to New York City.
1883 Brooklyn Bridge completed (connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn over the East River)
1890 Jacob Riis publishes his How the Other Half Lives, a view of the New York slums, which stimulated housing reform.
1921 Port Authority of New York created. To insure "faithful cooperation in the future planning and development of the port of New York." Empowered to operate "any terminal of transportation facility" within the port district. (later renamed the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey)
1855 The London physician John Snow publishes his map of the cholera outbreak in Soho [seen as a landmark prototype of a thematic map]
Physician Benjamin Ward Richardson wrote Hygeia, City of Health (1876)
the gutter with the park as the site of children’s playair pollution control
water purification
sewage handling
public laundries
public health inspectors
elimination of alcohol & tobacco
replacement of
Transition to the Industrial City
Cities have changed more since the Industrial Revolution than in all the previous centuries of their existence. New York had a population of about 313,000 in 1840 but had reached 4,767,000 in 1910. Chicago exploded from 4.000 to 2,185,000 during the same period. Millions of rural dwellers no longer needed on farms flocked to the cities, where new factories churned out products for the new markets made accessible by railroads and steamships. In the United States, millions of immigrants from Europe swelled the urban populations. Increasingly, urban economies were being woven more rightly into the national and international economies. Technological innovations poured forth, many with profound impacts on urban form. Railroad tracks were driven into the heart of the city. Internal rail transportation systems greatly expanded the radius of urban settlement: horsecars beginning in the 1830s, cable cars in the 1870s, and electric trolleys in the 1880s. In the 1880s, the first central power plants began providing electrical power to urban areas. The rapid communication provided by the telegraph and the telephone allowed formerly concentrated urban activities to disperse across a wider field.
The industrial city still focused on the city center, which contained both the central business district, defined by large office buildings, and substantial numbers of factory and warehouse structures. Both trolleys and railroad systems converged on the center of the city, which boasted the premier entertainment and shopping establishments. The working class lived in crowded districts close to the city center, near their place of employment.
Early American factories were located outside of major cities along rivers which provided water power for machinery. After steam power became widely available in the 1930s, factories could be located within the city in proximity to port facilities, rail lines, and the urban labor force. Large manufacturing zones emerged within the major northeastern and midwestern cities such as Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Cleveland. But by the late nineteenth century, factory decentralization had already begun, as manufacturers sought larger parcels of land away from the congestion of the city. Gary, Indiana, for example, was founded in 1906 on the southern shore of Lake Michigan by the United States Steel Company.
The increasing crowding, pollution, and disease in the central city produced a growing desire to escape to a healthier environment in the suburbs. The upper classes had always been able to retreat to homes in the countryside. Beginning in the 1830s, commuter railroads enabled the upper middle class to commute in to the city center. Horsecar lines were built in many cities between the 1830s and 1880s, allowing the middle class to move out from the central cities into more spacious suburbs. Finally, during the 1890s electric trolleys and elevated rapid transit lines proliferated, providing cheap urban transportation for the majority of the population.
The central business district of the city underwent a radical transformation with the development of the skyscraper between 1870 and 1900. These tall buildings were not technically feasible until the invention of the elevator and steel-frame construction methods. Skyscrapers reflect the dynamics of the real estate market; the tall building extracts the maximum economic value from a limited parcel of land. These office buildings housed the growing numbers of white-collar employees in banking, finance, management, and business services, all manifestations of the shift from an economy of small firms to one of large corporations.
such concerns motivated the Parks Movement
1886 statute: San Fran. Chinese laundries shut down
Fed. court case: Yick Wo v. Hopkins, Sheriff struck down statute, so city imposed no-laundry zone
other CA cities zoned against laundries, brothels, pool halls, dance halls, livery stables, slaughterhouses
How? municipality’s trad. responsibility for protecting “health, safety, morals and general welfare” of citizens
1st NY zoning law (1916) protected Fifth Ave. luxury store owners from expansion of Jewish garment factories
protected property values and expressed chauvinism
idea spread to 100s of cities in decade after the NY law was passed, promoting property values and special interests of the upper class, white majority
1886 statute: San Fran. Chinese laundries shut down
1896 United States v. Gettysburg Electric Railway Co. The first significant legal case concerning historic preservation. The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the acquisition of the national battlefield at Gettysburg served a valid public purpose.
1901 New York State Tenement Housing Act of 1901 [required improvements in window ventilation, courtyards, fire safety, etc.]
1906 Antiquities Act of 1906: First law to institute federal protection for preserving archaeological sites. Provided for designation as National Monuments areas already in the public domain that contained "historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and objects of historic or scientific interest."
1907 the first city planning commission (in Hartford, CT) established
1st NY zoning law (1916) protected Fifth Ave. luxury store owners from expansion of Jewish garment factories
1924 U.S. Dept. of Commerce (under Secretary Herbert Hoover) issues a Standard State Zoning Enabling Act.
1926
Village of Euclid vs. Ambler Reality (constitutionality of zoning upheld by Supreme Court)
Edward Bassett, 1935, Master Plan concept
Patrick Geddes (1904, 1915) called for urban planning to take into account the ecosystem and history of a region, called for social surveys
a protégé of Geddes, Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) was the first notable critic of sprawl and the main figure in the Regional Plan Association of America, which built new towns in NJ & NY
concept of the “master plan”: Edward Bassett, 1935, included:
infrastructure layout
zoning
Patrick Geddes (1904, 1915) called for urban planning to take into account the ecosystem and history of a region, called for social surveys
a protégé of Geddes, Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) was the first notable critic of sprawl and the main figure in the Regional Plan Association of America, which built new towns in NJ & NY
1951 Stanford Industrial Park created by Stanford University (later renamed Stanford Research Park); first tenants, Varian Brothers, arrive in 1953. [becomes an early center of what would become known as "Silicon Valley"; an example of university-firm technology transfer]
1954 In Berman vs. Parker, the U.S. Supreme Court upholds the right of Washington, D.C. Redevelopment Land Agency to condemn properties which are unsightly though nondeteriorated if required to achieve objectives of duly established area redevelopment plan.
1954 Youngtown, Arizona, opens as the first age-restricted retirement community in the US
1955 Disneyland Park opens in Anaheim, CA.
1956 Passage of the U.S. Federal-Aid Highway Act (popularly known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act)
1959 Research Triangle Park created (between the cities of Raleigh, Durham
Jack and Laura Dangermond founded Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), in Redlands, CA. (an early developer of GIS - Geographic Information Systems) 1970
National Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established. Administers the main provisions of the Clean Air Act (1970).
1970 US Decennial Census confirms that, for the first time, more people live in suburbs (37.6%) than central cities (31.4%), with the remainder living outside metropolitan areas. † 1972
California passes the Coastal Zone Management Act (leading to the California Coastal Commission)
Housing and Community Development Act of 1974. It establishes the block grant (CDBG), as opposed to the categorical grant, as the main form of federal aid for local development.
1975 The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled, in Southern Burlington County N.A.A.C.P. v. Mount Laurel Township, that the township's zoning excluded low- and moderate-income persons. (eventually led to the principle that localities had an obligation to provide affordable housing)
1981 Construction of Seaside, Florida -- a New Urbanist town designed by Duany & Plater-Zyberk (DPZ).
1985 Jackson, Kenneth T. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.
1987 United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), "Our Common Future" (commonly known as "the Brundtland Report"). [an important landmark in the development of the sustainability movement]
1987 In First English Evangelical Lutheran Church v. County of Los Angeles, U.S. Supreme Court finds that even a temporary taking requires compensation. In Nollan v. California Coastal Commission, it finds that land-use restrictions, to be valid, must be tied directly to a specific public purpose.
1990 Formation of the "International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives" (ICLEI) at the United Nations' World Congress of Local Governments for Sustainable Future. (In 2003 renamed "ICLEI—Local Governments for Sustainability").
The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA). Federal law encouraging intermodal transportation policies, and granting new powers to Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs).
1992 The US Dept of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) begins the HOPE VI program (to provide low-rise, urban, walkable housing -- as an alternative to the old model of highrise public housing and the concentration of poverty)
1994 In Dolan v. City of Tigard, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that a jurisdiction must show that there is a "rough proportionality " between the adverse impacts of a proposed development and the exactions it wishes to impose on the developer.
1996 Celebration, Florida built as new town/planned community by Disney new town/project
1997 The State of Maryland enacts "Smart Growth and Neighborhood Conservation" legislation.
1999 the Georgia legislature creates the Georgia Regional Transportation Agency (GRTA) to address sprawl in Atlanta