Zoning Separation Anxiety: Lessons for Downtowns Returning to Vitality
Zoning is responsible for the efficient layout and functionality of our cities. And yet, many antiquated codes do not reflect the eclectic, diverse mix of spaces that contribute to vibrant neighborhoods and thriving communities. Here, we offer ideas to combat “zoning separation anxiety,” using Boston, and nearby Cambridge, MA—the birthplace of zoning codes and our author’s hometown—as templates.
Zoning codes are good at separating, and not so good at bringing us together. Yet of all the pressing issues in the world today perhaps the most important are solutions that unify our fragmented society. The pandemic, at its outset, showed us the value of separation. But it has also revealed the liabilities: division, loneliness, and economic malaise.
This problem is clearly illustrated by the juxtaposition of two distinct experiences happening in America’s downtowns: those urban centers with a kaleidoscopic mix of housing, commercial and retail activities have returned to, or exceed, pre-pandemic levels of vitality and viability. By contrast, downtowns where office or commercial uses dominate look like Edward Hopper paintings, empty, alienating and noir. Often separated and sparse, they remind me of some figures on today’s streets in our slowed down financial district right here in Boston. My views out my windows, I suspect are like many other views out office windows in slowed down downtowns across America.
And yet Boston’s geography and history leave it with distinct and separate downtown cores that further exemplify this contrast of experiences. The Back Bay, for example, sports a commercial edge. The largest landlord there, one of NBBJ’s clients, remarked that retail traffic and activity now exceeds pre-pandemic levels. He notes this is also true of Boston’s newest commercial district Seaport.
So, what distinguishes these districts? Back Bay and Seaport contain a painter’s-palette mix of uses including housing, retail, hospitality, open space and commercial land uses. They are downtowns that are successfully bringing people together. Bringing people together not just for pie-chart sales presentations and business plans like the financial district, but also for clam chowder, Sam Adams beer and the famously early bedtime that New England is known for.
Why Zoning Matters
I believe zoning is both part of the problem, and a potential solution, to these disparate downtown experiences. Those that are zoned for a single use, such as the downtown I see out my window, are suffering, whereas the painter’s-palettes neighborhoods are thriving.
Just across the water from Boston is Cambridge, the birthplace of zoning codes. Zoning was originally held by the courts to be a tool that could reasonably prevent a nuisance which might be the right thing in the wrong place, “like a pig in a parlor.” The birthright and fundamental reasoning behind zoning was to separate incompatible uses. A successful legal appeal in Cambridge challenged the reason for zoning. The birth of zoning as a tool for separation and by extension as a powerful tool of racial and class segregation and was perhaps exposed as a liability right from the outset of its birth.
Cambridge’s 100-year-old zoning case centered on property near the corner of Henry and Brookline Streets next to where my two boys played Little League and just three blocks from my home in Cambridge. The property is just behind the beautiful and historic Ford Motor Company assembly plant at 640 Memorial Drive, now becoming a 21st century life science research and development platform being rejuvenated by NBBJ!
The Cambridge suit insisted on a more complex and nuanced foundation for zoning regulations that need not emphasize separation but rather that, “a zoning restriction cannot be imposed if it does not bear substantial relation to the public health, safety, morals or general welfare."
I love this! What could be more important than to promote general welfare? It is promised in the preamble of our constitution. And general welfare though today’s lens argues stridently for questioning the powers of zoning to separate.
Project owners and designers working within participatory permitting processes often hear arguments that are frustratingly based on the misuse of zoning. Rather than a tool for city building, zoning becomes an effective and officious tool for separation, denial and control—complicated by the broad feeling that those that have lived here the longest have more rights over the vision of a future than the fresh, striving, imaginative and energetic new generations who actually have that future in front of them.
We at NBBJ are setting out to rid ourselves of loneliness and the suspicions that can grow out of zoning that aims to separate. We are imagining cities designed first for people, not for cars. We are reimagining all the places that people might call home. We are shining a light on exclusivity, on the unintentionally zoned gated community that single use promulgates.
Let’s mix it up and make cities more human and in the process just maybe make a more perfect union.