Abstract
This chapter reviews how urban regulations in history have been used to relegate populations to different parts of the city and its environs. Its main purpose is to place the twentieth-century U.S. zoning experience in historic and international context. To this end, based mostly on secondary sources, the chapter first surveys a selection of major civilizations in history and the regulations they invented in order to keep populations apart. Then, based on primary sources, it discusses the emergence of three methods of residential segregation through zoning which took root in early twentieth-century United States. The three methods are: segregating people by race, segregating them by different land-area standards, and segregating them based on both land-area standards and a taxonomy of single- versus multi-family housing.
I thank my graduate assistant Hossein Lavasani for his help with this chapter. Parts of the above text appear in another of my articles: Hirt, S. (2015). The Rules of Residential Segregation: US Housing Taxonomies and Their Precedents. Planning Perspectives, 30(3), 167–195.
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Notes
- 1.
The literature on US exclusionary zoning is well-known and I will not repeat its basic charges here. The classics include P. Davidoff and M. Brooks. “Zoning out the poor”, in Suburbia: American dream and dilemma, edited by P. Dolce. Garden City: Anchor, 1976; A. Downs, Opening up the suburbs: An urban strategy for America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973; C. Haar and J. Kayden (eds). Zoning and the American Dream: Promises still to keep. Chicago: Planners Press, 1989.
- 2.
Inclusionary zoning and zoning for affordable housing is also widely discussed in the literature and I will not repeat the basics here. For example, D. Porter Inclusionary Zoning for Affordable Housing. Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute, 2004; M. Morris, Incentive Zoning: Meeting Urban Design and Affordable Housing Objectives. Chicago: Planners Press, 2000.
- 3.
We should keep in mind that zoning rules are only part of a package of actions through which governments may pursue residential segregation. The reshuffling of the Parisian population during the Haussmann rebuilding frenzy in the 1800s and the consolidation of public housing in U.S. central cities in the 1900s have caused residential segregation more than zoning rules could.
- 4.
Since Marduk was not real, the order was likely passed by the priests who ruled in his name.
- 5.
With the growth of suburbs in American history, the roles of urban center and periphery were reversed. Rather than the city centers, it was the suburbs that became “walled off” (via zoning, that is).
- 6.
Aristotle, Politics, Book II (Chapter VII) (circa 350 BCE) (translated by W. Ellis) Accessed on July 18, 2012 at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6762/6762-h/6762-h.htm#2HCH0020
- 7.
I say “erroneously” because today we know these planning principles were already in use in earlier civilizations. S. Marshall, (ed.) Cities, Design and Evolution. London: Routledge, 24, 2009.
- 8.
O. Robison, Ancient Rome, 15. The census at the end of the third century recorded 1790 domus and 44,300 insulae in Rome, according to L. Benevolo, The History of the City, 176.
- 9.
This type of arrangement was also used by some Chinese and Japanese rulers. D. Keene, Cities and Empires. Journal of Urban History 32(1) (2005) 8–21.
- 10.
Some ancient cities, going back all the way to Harappa, had areas outside of town designated for the foreign travelling merchants. See C. Nightingale, Segregation.
- 11.
Medieval cities, like ancient ones, exhibited clear signs of occupational specialization in space. Medieval streets often carried the names of the occupational groups that dominated them: the street of goldsmiths, the street of glassworks (see Sjoberg, G, The Pre-industrial City). But unless occupation intersected with nationality or ethnicity (as in the case of foreign merchants), this separation followed from social customs and the advantages linked to the proximity of similar economic activities, rather than from law. The only relatively modern example of a government attempt to legally segregate a city by profession (and caste) that I could find comes from St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1703, Peter the Great tried to segregate the city. The population was divided into three groups: the merchants and professional specialists, the shopkeepers and craftsmen, and the commoners, each with their own quarters. But according to M. Hugo-Brunt, The History of City Planning, the authorities failed to maintain the separation.
- 12.
Many medieval European cities had their Jewish populations confined to a quarter that “resembled a colony on an island or on a distant coast”; Lofland, A World of Strangers, 1973, 50. Other populations often confined to separate quarters were the sick and the “feeble-minded.”
- 13.
This was a very mild treatment as compared to what the English were doing in Ireland. In the 1400s, the Crown decreed that farmers plow seventy miles of earthworks to keep the “wild Irish” away from English-speaking Dublin. Later monarchs even forbade Irish Catholics from living in any cities located on the island where they were born. See C. Nightingale, Segregation.
- 14.
An Act for Erecting a Judicature for Determination of Differences Touching Houses Burned or Demolished in the Late Fire Which Happened in London (1667). Accessed on November 2, 2012 at http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/Exploreonline/Past/LondonsBurning/Themes/1405/1408/Page1.htm
- 15.
On his life and work, see G. Power, The advent of zoning. Planning Perspectives 4 (1989): 1–13.
- 16.
This is about a century after such covenants had proliferated in London.
- 17.
On private regulations, see: M. Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: The American real estate industry and urban land planning. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987; D. Young, Common Interest Developments: A Historical Review of CID Development, 1996. Accessed on March 10, 2013 at http://www.uwec.edu/geography/ivogeler/w270/cids.htm; R. Fogelson, Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870–1930, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2005; R. Fischler and K. Kolnik. American Zoning: German Import or Home Product?, 2006 Paper presented at the Second World Planning Schools Congress (Mexico City, July 11–16).
- 18.
Cited by Fogelson, Bourgeois Nightmares, 124.
- 19.
Cited by R. Brooks and C. Rose Racial Covenants and Segregation, Yesterday and Today, 2010, 4. Accessed on September 12, 2012 http://www.nyustraus.org/pubs/0910/docs/Rose.pdf
- 20.
Unlike their twentieth-century counterparts, these ordinances were not comprehensive and citywide.
- 21.
Cited by W. Pollard, Outline of the law of zoning in the United States. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 155, Part 2: Zoning in the United States (1931): 15–33.
- 22.
Ibid., 18.
- 23.
Bither was Director of the Manufacturers’ Association in Berkeley, California.
- 24.
For instance, the neighborhood of Guilford Park, where no house could be occupied by “any person negro or of negro extraction.” Cited by R. Fogelson, 65.
- 25.
Karst, K. L. Buchanan v. Warley 245 U.S. 60 (1917). Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, 1.
- 26.
In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer (334 U.S. 1) that privately induced racial housing segregation is legally unenforceable: “Private agreements to exclude persons of designated race or color from the use or occupancy of real estate for residential purposes… [are] violative of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” In reality, racist deeds became unlawful only after the Fair Housing Act of 1968. R. Brooks and C. Rose, Saving the Neighborhood: Racially Restrictive Covenants, Law, and Social Norms. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.
- 27.
On Bassett and zoning, see Toll, Zoned American, and Power, The Advent of Zoning, among many other sources.
- 28.
New York Board of Estimate and Apportionment, New York City Building Zone Resolution, Restricting the Height and Use of Buildings and Prescribing the Minimum Sizes of Their Yards and Courts. New York: Author (1917).
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Ibid., 72.
- 31.
Some cities outside of New York and California, like Minneapolis, had similarly experimented with such zones.
- 32.
City of Berkeley, Districting Ordinance No. 452-N.S. Berkeley: Author, 1916.
- 33.
On his life and work, see F. Akimoto, Charles H. Cheney of California. Planning Perspectives 18 (July) (2003): 253–275.
- 34.
C. Cheney, “The necessity for a zone ordinance in Berkeley”. Berkeley Civic Bulletin III(10) (1915), 165.
- 35.
This example shows that, at least in the United States, the border between public and private regulations is ambiguous. In Berkeley and many other cities at the time, a municipality would create zoning rules, but they would take effect only if residents petitioned it to apply them to their neighborhood. A version of public-private partnership in rule-making exists today in Houston. See C. Berry, Land use regulation and residential segregation: Does zoning matter? American Law and Economics Review 3(2) (2001) 251–274; M. Lewyn, How overregulation creates sprawl (even in a city without zoning). Wayne Law Review 50 (2004) 1171–1208.
- 36.
He was President of the Civic Art Commission.
- 37.
Village of Euclid, v Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926).
- 38.
I have never found a quote from an early twentieth-century US zoning advocate admitting to have learned from the European colonial practices. I imagine such a confession would have been politically unacceptable. But this does mean that such “learning” never happened. Notably, racial separation in both America and the European colonies was justified in health, safety, and comfort terms (see Nightingale, Segregation).
- 39.
On how zoning districts subdivided and multiplied, see D. Elliott, A better way to zone: Ten principles to create more livable cities. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2008.
- 40.
The reasons I discuss are cultural. For an economic explanation of zoning, see W. Fischel, The Homevoter Hypothesis: How Home Values Affect Government Taxation, School Finance and Land-use Policies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. My interpretation comes closest to C. Perin Everything in Its Place: Social order and Land Use in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977; M. Lees, Preserving property values? Preserving proper homes? Preserving privilege: The pre-Euclid debate over zoning for exclusively private residential areas, 1916–1926. University of Pittsburgh Law Review 56 (1994) 367–428; and Hirt, Home, Sweet Home.
- 41.
The theories of the Chicago School are a good example.
- 42.
See also R. Fischler, Health, safety and welfare: Markets, politics, and social science in early land-use regulation and community design. Journal of Urban History 24 (1998a) 675–719; R. Fischler, Toward a genealogy of planning: Zoning and the welfare state. Planning Perspectives 13 (1998b) 389–410.
- 43.
Cited in Zoning in Atlanta, Journal of the American Institute of Architects, 1922 (10), 205.
- 44.
Note that only a quarter of dwellings in the United Kingdom are detached homes and that, as earlier said, the English never employed exclusive single-family zoning as did the United States.
- 45.
In the words of Andrew Jackson Downing, by building family “cottages,” America could distinguish itself other “coarse and brutal people.” A. Downing, “The architecture of country houses,” The suburb reader, edited by B. Nicolaides and A. Weise. New York: Routledge, 2006 [1850].
- 46.
E. Bassett, “Present attitudes of courts toward zoning”, in Planning problems of town, city and region: Papers and discussions at the fifteenth National Conference on City Planning held at Buffalo and Niagara Falls, New York. Philadelphia: Fell, 1923, 117.
- 47.
A. Crawford, “What zoning is,” in Zoning as an element in city planning, and for protection of property values, public safety and public health, edited by L. Purdy, H. Bartholomew, E. Bassett, A. Crawford and H. Swan. Washington, DC: American Civic Association, 1920, 7.
- 48.
New York’s City Board of Estimate and Apportionment, New York City Building Zone Resolution, 20–22, 31.
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Hirt, S.A. (2018). Split Apart: How Regulations Designated Populations to Different Parts of the City. In: Lehavi, A. (eds) One Hundred Years of Zoning and the Future of Cities . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66869-7_1
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