Los Angeles was one of the first large cities in the U.S. to adopt a kind of modern zoning to keep the industrial away from the residential.
If the city would have more mixed use, with people living closer to retail and workplaces, Los Angeles would feel like another city, with less of its land area dedicated to low density, single family residential neighborhoods, and more streets with shops and businesses on the ground floor and homes above.
— kcet.org
"The Laws That Shaped L.A." is a weekly series on LA-based radio station KCET, spotlighting regulations that have played a significant role in the development of contemporary Los Angeles. These laws - as nominated and explained each week by a locally-based expert - may be civil or criminal, and they may have been put into practice by city, county, state, federal or even international authority.
6 Comments
Historical perspective is crucial, and usually absent from the typical "gosh, why did those darned planners do what they did?" kinds of stories. And the inclusion of a particularly juicy image (like the one above) only simplifies for current consumption what was a complex set of social, political, economic, cultural and technological forces interacting over time.
Zoning to isolate and separate different land uses certainly had debilitating implications for social and race relations in many places (as the above image rightly suggests). Large-lot, low-density residential (sometimes called "exclusionary") zoning far from public transit lines (and combined with racially restrictive private deed restrictions) virtually guaranteed a socio-economically segregated population distribution in cities. And this was part of a strategy among some in the booming early-20th century metropolis.
But the wide separation of land uses considered incompatible was part of a much larger urban reform movement responding to decades of unsanitary, unsafe, and unhealthy (even deadly) conditions for many urbanites in the late 19th and early 20th century. Progressive reformers working for the betterment of poor and minority communities lobbied just as hard as anyone to separate homes from jobs at a time when most working-class jobs were in toxic, polluted, noisy and very dangerous places. (Housing reforms and labor reforms were also taking place.)
This is not a defense of the many problems that have resulted from single-use zoning, only an insistence that we look at the bigger picture, and not summarily dismiss and blame without better understanding. Land-use segregation constituted best practices a hundred years ago, just as mixing (certain, not all) uses is today. The lesson is not how could those planners (and architects, too, by the way) have been so stupid and/or devious? But rather could they have foreseen some of the negative unintended consequences and tried to prevent them? We should ask those same questions of ourselves today, and not arrogantly assume that, finally, we are the brilliant generation that has finally solved urban problems once and for all. Might there be real problems with "smart" growth that we should try to anticipate and correct?
Compare this topic with a photo of a bland modern building behind a bald, bespectacled modernist (insert favorite name here) with a caption like "The Roots of Modern Architecture: Why Don't Architects Design What People Want?" We architects would rail at such a dopey and reductive oversimplification. The same search for true but complicated answers should be applied to other things -- such as the roots, creation, and implementation of zoning.
related - recent article from the NYTimes on suburban poverty... and the political history of the suburbs.
nice citizen. very true.
if architects built what people wanted...
that is, completely caved into the populist and pervasive mind set of what most people think they "want"
great comment, citizen. I found even in urban planning courses, there's always more room for the historical perspective. But your reframing is closer to a key question in public policy analysis: anticipating unintended consequences is the next biggest issue...after actually having a good idea that you can pay for.
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