Speaking at a January 30 forum hosted by transit advocacy organization Tacoma On the Go, Casas, who is an associate professor at the University of Washington Tacoma and serves on the Tacoma Transportation Commission, referenced outgoing Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy’s letter discussing the negative health effects of social isolation, and said that he and others “live in cities by name only.”

“Really, we live in suburbs that have certain sections or islands that are true cities. […] Between them, there’s a lot of gaps, and those gaps are created because we have designed places where you need to bring a one-ton, very big piece of property with you to be anywhere you want to go,” Casas continued. “This matters because if we want to remake our society, we have to start by creating more proximity between you and the people you care about.”

That’s where the concept of a 15-minute city or neighborhood comes in. In a 15-minute neighborhood, people don’t need a car to access their basic needs — things like groceries, health care, school, or being able to meet up with a friend. Instead, all of these activities and amenities should be within a 15-minute walk or bike ride of home. 

Casas, South Sound Housing Affordability Partners program specialist Alyssa Torrez, Pierce County Planning Commission Chair Robb Krehbiel, and moderator Tanisha Jumper discussed this kind of urban layout during the forum, as Tacoma works to create its own 15-minute neighborhoods. (Note: Casas is also a boardmember at The Urbanist, which is run as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, and he has contributed articles as a freelancer.)

Carlos Moreno, a French Colombian professor, researcher, and scientist, coined the term “15-minute city” in 2016; but, Casas said, the concept is “an organic and very historical way that human settlements have been set up,” where “the neighborhood becomes the organizing principle for everyday life.”

With the rise of car culture and car-centric city planning throughout the past century, this isn’t the case for most American cities today, and certainly isn’t the case for Tacoma. But it’s where the city wants to go, with an eye towards mitigating environmental impacts in the face of rising density and population.

City-level actions

Part of this vision lies with Home in Tacoma, a housing reform vehicle the City has used to work towards its vision of 15-minute neighborhoods. Krehbiel said he thinks it’s “one of the biggest things” that’s allowed the City to progress in this direction.

“I joke with our former chair that we essentially rezoned the entire city in that update and made it so that it was easier to do more dense development in our residential areas,” Krehbiel said. “There are still areas that are low density, but along, especially, our public transit areas, we have a lot higher density in those areas to encourage more folks to live along bus routes, train routes, to reduce their dependency on [private] vehicles.”

Home in Tacoma also created designations for neighborhood centers and mixed-use centers, which allows small businesses to be located within neighborhoods. Krehbiel also noted that this year, the Tacoma Planning Commission will be discussing removing parking requirements for new developments. He explained that building off-street parking infrastructure is “a major cost,” and “that’s a lot of extra material for a space that isn’t always used.”

Removing parking mandates, he continued, encourages more development that isn’t quite so car-centric, and instead attracts people who want to use public transportation to get to those places.

Torrez said that Tacoma has already started to implement 15-minute city principles by including them in the most recent update to its Comprehensive Plan. The updated plan went into effect last year.

“Different cities throughout Pierce County […] adopted it in different ways, or might not be using the terminology ‘15-Minute Cities,’” she said, “but are still putting into effect some of the policies that are supporting that, like increasing density, increasing modes of transportation, and looking at some sub-area plans. There’s lots of different things that folks are doing throughout Pierce County that are supporting this kind of effort.”

In the Complete Neighborhoods section of its Comprehensive Plan, the City outlined Tacoma’s conditions, such as street layouts, existing development patterns, and its different business districts. Because each neighborhood in Tacoma is unique and has been shaped both by a variety of cultures and geographic features, the City intends to implement 15-minute city tenets in a neighborhood-specific way.

The City listed several goals and set out a number of policies intended to bring its 15-minute city vision a step closer to reality. These policies include creating community gathering places, prioritizing walkability, and enhancing cultural and historical visibility and expression, through things like architecture and access to culturally relevant food.

Funding needs

It’s hard to meet those goals without the financial means to do so — and the City can’t count on federal funding help in the near-term. Krehbiel noted that the current administration has all but stated that federal funds aren’t going to be available for the 15-minute cities investments Tacoma has envisioned.

“There were some federal dollars that were pulled from projects that Pierce Transit was depending on to increase public transit along Pacific Avenue,” Krehbiel continued. “The general funding situation in the state and in the city is pretty tight, and it’s unclear to me what new revenue or sources might be on the horizon outside of the city of Tacoma.”

While the City of Tacoma is not banking on federal funding for its plans, advocates want the City to get started, using funds it can raise locally.

The transportation factor

Accessible public transit is, of course, an important aspect of 15-minute cities. Pierce Transit has long struggled to meet transportation needs, primarily due to funding hurdles. One of the major ways it could address this issue is by raising the tax it collects from local sales, which makes up three-quarters of the agency’s budget. Currently, that tax sits at 0.6%. It’s the lowest amount of sales tax collected among Pierce Transit’s peer agencies, and has not changed for more than two decades. Ultimately, it would be up to voters to approve or reject any attempt to raise that tax, and the agency has not committed to bringing a measure to voters.

Jumper asked Casas whether he believes that Tacoma can still pursue its vision for 15-minute neighborhoods, even if voters reject this sales tax increase.

“Yes. Pierce Transit and what it does or doesn’t do — it’s one piece of the puzzle, but one thing I’ve learned […] volunteering as a transportation commissioner is that long-term visioning and planning for transportation requires people to envision how it could be,” he replied.

Casas considers transit “movable public space,” and for it to be successful, people have to use it, in order to create the grounds to advocate for further investment in transit — such as hiring more bus drivers and train operators.

“The more we use the public spaces we have as we envision using them in the future as ideal public spaces, including transit, the more our agency partners will realize, ‘Yes, there is a reason to make these investments,’” he explained. “And then our own neighbors over time will realize […] there is a reason to make these investments through levies and bonds, etc.”

Jumper asked Casas how the Tacoma Streets Initiative plays into all of this, and what happens if the City fails to pass the second phase of the initiative again. The initiative would have used a property tax levy and utility tax hike to fund the much-needed repair of Tacoma’s unsafe street conditions, like aged arterials and corridors too dangerous for pedestrians and bikers to safely use. While voters approved the first phase of the initiative in 2015, they narrowly rejected the second phase last spring.

Casas believes that if the City sells the measure better to voters, who complain about things like potholes — which the second phase of the initiative would address — the measure will succeed. That said, he emphasized that the City needs to highlight in its pitch to voters that streets aren’t “just a monoculture” for cars, and that they are meant for people, too.

One way to do this is called a road diet, which is when municipalities narrow or remove traffic lanes in order to reduce collision rates and make the street more pedestrian friendly. Typically, a municipality can use the space it reclaims from cars to widen sidewalks, add bike lanes, and/or add trees.

Krehbiel pointed out that trees are an important part of a city’s infrastructure. It’s much more pleasant, he said, to walk under trees along the side of a busy road, so that traffic noise isn’t so intense.

“And you also get a little bit of a canopy to protect you from the rain that’s falling on days like today,” he continued. “So we’re looking at ways to encourage more trees to be planted in areas where it’s not [well-treed], to protect the trees that we have, and make sure that we are dispersing that tree canopy in an equitable way across the city.”

Krehbiel encouraged members of the public who want more tree cover to advocate for them at different committees and meetings, and that they join organizations like the Tacoma Tree Foundation, which puts trees in right-of-ways, particularly in areas where there are few.

Tacoma’s real cost of living

Torrez reminded audience members that the City’s updated Comprehensive Plan looks out 20 years into the future, and that the City also wanted to design Tacoma’s neighborhoods with youth in mind, since they will ultimately inherit the city from older generations.

Affordability — specifically, the cost to live and commute in Tacoma — is another important metric, Casas noted. When people talk about how much more affordable Tacoma is, he said, that’s only because many folks live in Tacoma and still work in Seattle. How would that affordability view change, he posited, if the cost to commute to a job or school were factored in? Such an analysis would reveal, he surmised, that neighborhoods are set up to subsidize cars, rather than human wellbeing. 

“I think sometimes people are resistant to that because we’ve become acculturated to the idea that we need a car to get everywhere,” he continued. “But another way that I invite you to think about it is, it’s a tax, right? […] You are subsidizing your own participation in everyday life and our economy. A lot of people in the world are not asked to do that, but we are, and you should at the end of the year account for how much you are paying for your own right to work.”

The post Becoming a ’15-Minute City’ Could Be Within Reach for Tacoma first appeared on The Urbanist.

Last fall, community members gathered in the parking lot of the Othello Safeway to honor the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims. The event was a somber reflection of the infrastructure injustices faced disproportionately by communities of color. In King County, for instance, 70% of Sound Transit collisions occur in South Seattle, underscoring how deeply racial inequities are built into our streets, sidewalks, and transit systems.

These inequities are not due to a lack of vision. The urbanist movement — committed to people-centered communities, public transit, walkability, bikeability, and housing affordability through housing density — has fundamentally reshaped our region’s discourse on how we build thriving cities. But to fully realize the transformative promise of urbanism, we must be willing to ask: urbanism for whom?

Too often, urbanist conversations and strategies have centered on the concerns of wealthier and whiter neighborhoods, places with the resources and political capital to advocate effectively for their needs. Meanwhile, neighborhoods like South Seattle, Skyway, and other working-class communities of color remain sidelined. Their needs — safer sidewalks, basic transit access, housing stability, and public safety — are urbanist needs, too.

Urbanism is, at its core, about how people interact with the built environment and what we can do to make those interactions better. That interaction looks very different depending on where you live, how much you earn, and what neighborhood you call home. For some, it’s about protected bike lanes and zoning reform. For others, it’s about whether your child can safely walk to school without crossing a four-lane highway. Both are valid urbanist concerns.

A more expansive urbanism centers efforts to reduce speed limits and build sidewalks in Skyway, a neighborhood that still lacks basic pedestrian infrastructure. It centers thoughtful, community-led planning like the Rainier Valley Safety Master Plan to address transit safety in one of our region’s most diverse corridors. It means Missing Middle Housing legislation, which increases density while being cognizant of displacement pressures in vulnerable communities. It means promoting Black and Brown homeownership to keep communities rooted in place. And it means big swings like the Regional Workforce Housing Initiative to invest billions into affordable homes near jobs and transit.

These efforts reflect our vision — as two leaders of color in the urbanist movement — of a broader, more inclusive urbanism than the one that gets the most attention. This more inclusive vision has motivated many new voices to engage with their community’s politics for better buses and more housing. This vision is an urbanism that integrates housing, safety, transit, and public health with racial and economic justice. 

If we want to build people-centered communities, we must measure our success not only in transit ridership or housing units permitted, but in a deeper care and attention paid to who benefits. How many pedestrian injuries occur in low-income neighborhoods versus more affluent ones? Are we reducing gun violence and improving mental health services alongside our transit investments? Are families being displaced by the very policies intended to help them?

We can make progress on all these questions if we expand the scope of our urbanist vision. 

Together, we can evolve a movement initially rooted in density and design to expand its mission, its aims, and its energies to include justice and belonging. Urbanism can and should be a vehicle for equity, sustainability, and shared prosperity and must work for everyone. Let’s build a King County where it does.

Girmay Zahilay is the Chair of the King County Council and a candidate for King County Executive.

Rian Watt is vice-president of The Urbanist Board of Directors and the organization’s former executive director.

Editor’s note: Read about our endorsement process. The Urbanist’s primary endorsements are published in July. This guest op-ed has no bearing in that process and does not connote an endorsement. The Board of Directors do not play a role in The Urbanist’s endorsement decisions, which are made by the Elections Committee.

The post Op-Ed: Expand Urbanism, Emphasize Inclusion and Equity in Our Shared Vision first appeared on The Urbanist.

The relationship between zoning and the housing crisis is complex, as discussed in Part I. Many of the consequences of early zoning rules are still embedded in the urban infrastructure of cities today, and have continual effects on groups of vulnerable people. For those working in urban development, the search for solutions to these problems is a complex one.

Nonetheless, a number of potential solutions exist, some of which are already being studied to determine their effectiveness. Several cities have taken steps to remedy historic zoning issues, while others highlight how difficult it can be to make changes to well-entrenched systems such as zoning and their impacts. The overall picture, however, shows that hope may be on the horizon. Let’s take a look.

What Are the Solutions?

Proposed solutions run the gamut, from abolishing zoning, to implementing stricter inclusionary zoning, boosting housing production, building specifically more affordable homes, increasing housing density in hopes of lowering prices, protecting existing communities and rejecting development that could displace people. While those fixes can be at odds, in many respects, we already know some of the answers.

William Fischel, the author of Zoning Rules, says that building more housing is a major component of the solution. As he puts it, “More housing is more housing. It’s not just a particular kind of housing [that is needed]. The trickle-down effect of housing for rich people does push down the market for every other kind of house and gets down to people who couldn’t afford a house, who can now afford that modest starter house. That’s the way it’s worked for many years.”

A review paper by Vicki Been and two colleagues from NYU found that building more housing does reduce or slow growth in rents (as well as in the surrounding area), newly-vacant houses are bought by lower-income groups, and easing land-use regulations does help to fuel the growth in housing development. 

Economist Noah Smith argues that building more housing works, but that it should be done in a nuanced way. He explains that building what he terms “Yuppie fishtanks” to catch inbound high-income families, along with building long-time resident housing, and affordable housing, can help to prevent gentrification, keep rents stable, and reduce displacement. A 2019 study showed the same effect: that building market-rate housing in low-income areas decreased rents, and absorbed higher-income households wishing to move to the area. The authors note that while there is a “strong observed correlation between new construction, rising rents, and demographic change [i.e. gentrification], this is because new buildings are typically constructed in areas that are already changing.”

Samuel Stein, author of Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, explains that one part of the solution could also be social housing models well established in Europe and Singapore and being explored in Seattle and in New York City, which introduced legislation earlier this year that would establish the city’s Social Housing Development Authority (SHDA). The SHDA would build, acquire, and convert housing into social housing.

“[New York’s Social Housing Development Authority] has resident participation on the board, it has union worker participation on the board, and union standards built into it,” Stein says. “It has environmental standards built into it, and transit guidance in terms of where any development should happen.”

The establishment of the SHDA could be a major win for socialist legislators in the city, if the legislation is successful. Seattle is also pursuing a social housing development authority, with a funding measure on the ballot in February that builds off an authorizing measure that passed a public vote in early 2023.

Regardless of any mechanisms or legislation applied, Sonia Hirt, who wrote Zoned in the USA, says that due to the major shift towards remote working, the separation of function by zoning may no longer make sense. The integration of technology into daily life, and the impacts from this shift, have already led to a large number of retail store closures and commercial office spaces remaining empty. Hirt says that “things will change so much technologically in the next few years that the whole [zoning] system may simply become obsolete and not necessary.”

As for alleviating past wrongs, Richard Kahlenberg, the author of Excluded, explains that school system changes are also part of the solution. Because of exclusionary zoning, lower-income students end up in worse-quality schools, as schooling has been typically tied strictly to the neighborhood that a student lives in. Even when new housing developments are built or a neighborhood changes, it may take generations for a family to see the effects in educational achievement and income.

Kahlenberg says that he advocates strongly for “choice within the public school system, so that the quality of the school a student attends is not entirely based on the type of neighborhood that parents can afford to live in. This can be part of the more immediate solution because housing [and zoning] changes take time.”

Furthermore, Kahlenberg advocates for a Fair Housing Act that also prohibits discrimination based on economic means, rather than only race. In this respect, he explains that when a municipality proposes to ban multi-family housing, or to require large minimum lot sizes, an “Economic” Fair Housing Act would “put the burden on the municipality to provide a good justification” for the choices that they make with regard to zoning in those ways. He believes that the threat of litigation coming from such legislation would provide “a powerful incentive for municipalities to do the right thing and open up their communities to people of all backgrounds.”

Finally, in his ground-breaking essay “The Case for Reparations” published in The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that reparations should be paid to Black people in the United States, due to the long history of housing discrimination and redlining in the United States. A bill was proposed to this effect in 1989, known as “H.R. 40”, which aims to create the “Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans.” The influence of zoning and its effects (including its intertwining with redlining and predatory lending) may also need to be approached from this perspective. Many cities have already taken steps to this effect.

Let’s take a look at a couple of case studies of zoning approaches and challenges in Seattle, Minneapolis, and San Francisco.

Seattle

In 2023, Washington state passed legislation overriding cities’ powers to ban zoning for multi-family housing. However, certain wealthy neighborhoods such as Broadmoor in Seattle are exempted from this rule, allowing these places to remain exclusionary. These are also the neighborhoods which had traditionally exclusionary zoning intended to keep out racial minorities and lower classes. Reported in the Seattle Times, a local resident commented on the exclusion saying that “There’s always a loophole. It’s always like that. We’ll do density everywhere else, except the rich.”

Nonetheless, the new Seattle Comprehensive Plan may make additional changes to zoning in the city that could include greater incentives for building more multi-family housing. However, the Plan is still in development (and behind schedule), and in many cases is seen to be not ambitious enough. For example, multi-family housing is proposed focused around fourplex townhomes, instead of sixplexes or more, limiting potential for rapid housing growth.

Despite carve outs for wealthy neighborhoods and an unambitious Comprehensive Plan, the city (and state) still appears to be taking steps in the right direction, albeit too cautiously.

Minneapolis

Minneapolis has been held up as a bastion of zoning reform by numerous commentators, because of the Minneapolis 2040 Plan. This was announced in 2018 and implemented in 2020. This established Minneapolis as the first major city in the US to abolish single-family zoning. 

Sadly, as one reporter notes, the actual count of duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes being built is “not impressive” — definitely not “the stuff of revolutions, and certainly not enough to address the larger supply crunch.”

Samuel Stein says “Minneapolis everyone loves, because they got rid of single family zoning. But they haven’t actually built a lot of multi-family housing there.” While this may be true for the zones that were previously dominated by single-family homes (and remain so), Minneapolis is building multi-family housing in other areas. In particular, large apartment buildings contributed most significantly to the expansion of housing stock in the city, while keeping rent growth low.

Nonetheless, Stein is concerned that at times, political talk is nothing more than that. He says: “City politicians have a way of saying ‘We will build such and such,’ but they almost never do. They change the zoning, so that someone else can build something, but there’s so many other factors that determine what a private builder will actually build.” This highlights the challenges inherent in making changes to zoning laws, and the complexities that arise outside of the regulatory framework itself.

San Francisco

San Francisco was covered by Richard Rothstein in his well-known book, The Color of Law, as an example of a city that employed federal housing policies in service of racial segregation from the 1930s through the 1950s. But we now consider San Francisco to be a bastion of liberal and progressive values. Have things, including in zoning policy, changed?

A project by Berkley found that in San Francisco 86% of residential land is still zoned for single-family housing. In addition, single-family zoning is strongly associated with resident populations that are predominantly white. The authors note that “single-family zoning not only restricts the construction of affordable housing, but is a clearly powerful policy mechanism for the perpetuation of racial and economic segregation across the region.”

Taking a broader state-wide perspective, zoning for single-family housing applies in 95% of California’s residential districts. To combat this, a law was passed in 2021 abolishing zoning for single-family housing in California. Five districts sued the state in 2022, and recently, a Los Angeles court found that the law is unconstitutional. The law was then struck down for the five districts that resisted it, and it may be struck down state-wide as well.

Conclusions

The idea of zoning, i.e. maintaining positive uses and reducing nuisance, health impacts, or noise, has good intentions. But the ways in which it has been used has had negative effects for large groups of people. The shift towards YIMBYism and creative solutions, as well as the increasing recognition of past and continuing racial harms, perhaps shows that the tide is turning, however.

Correction: This article had incorrectly stated that New York City had already passed legislation establishing a social housing developer. That bill was only introduced, not passed. We regret the error.

The post Urbanism 101: Solutions to the Housing Crisis and Bad Zoning first appeared on The Urbanist.

In its modern form, however, zoning is thought to have begun in Germany in the 1870s, though the American system diverged within a few decades. As Sonia Hirt, professor of landscape architecture and planning at Georgia University, and author of Zoned in the USA says, zoning in the United States had developed into an “autonomous” and separate system by the 1930s.

In many early cases, zoning was used to separate the functions of industrial, commercial, and residential living. In addition, it was often used as a tool to enforce class and racial separation. From the beginning, residential zoning tended to favor the building of single-family homes, which exacerbated racial and class divides, and in many cases prevented access to good school districts and healthy neighborhoods for those on the outside. 

Approaches to zoning have changed significantly over the past 150 years, with zoning codes expanding inordinately, driven in part by “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) homeowner activism. In some places, opponents of NIMBYism, who sometimes call themselves YIMBYs, have won policy changes to redress the problematic effects zoning has had.

What is Zoning?

Zoning is a way of determining the use of land, or parameters of buildings in urban space. Zoning can be based around the function of a development, such as residential, commercial, or industrial. This use can be single-use or mixed-use. For instance, a mixed-use zone could include apartment buildings and low-impact commercial enterprises, such as restaurants, small shops, cafes, and public services such as hospitals and schools.

Zoning can also be based around form, such as a limit on the height of buildings, or a zone that requires a certain level of density. Other types of zoning may be based around the effects of a development, and how it will contribute to the existing area, or zoning based on incentives. One example of this could be a developer who is allowed to build an apartment block, but only if they include public housing, a community center, and a park as part of the development.

Opponents often refer to restrictive zoning as exclusionary zoning. For example, zoning for only single-family housing is exclusionary zoning, as it increases housing prices and may shut out lower-income families from the area (who could, for instance, afford an apartment, but not a single-family home). 

On the other hand, inclusionary zoning intends to provide affordable housing as part of apartment developments and multi-family dwellings. In its mandatory form, inclusionary zoning requires that builders provide a set percentage of affordable housing. Set the percentage too high, and some housing advocates would argue inclusionary zoning has the opposite effect by making new housing infeasible to build. Inclusionary zoning may create more opportunities for nonprofit homebuilders.

The History of Zoning in the United States

Early zoning focused on separation of land uses, which was in some instances fine-tuned to separate industries within industrial zones. William Fischel, former professor of economics at Dartmouth College and author of Zoning Rules! says that many early zoning codes focused on separating land based on industry, such as keeping meat-packing districts distinct from clothing districts. In part, the intention was also to reduce congestion in cities, first keeping workers close to their own industries, and later, keeping residential areas free from large trucks and buses.

This continued until the late 1920s, when the Standardized State Zoning Enabling Act came into force, followed by the Standard City Planning Enabling Act. These two pieces of legislation provided a standard regulation that was intended for states to follow, and guided the development of zoning regulation over the next decades.

Alongside the more practical developments, many early zoning codes were also used in pursuit of racial and class segregation. In Buchanan, a famous case in 1917, a White man (Buchanan) had sold a house to Warley, a Black man. In Louisville, where they lived, an ordinance didn’t allow Black people to live on a block where the majority of existing residents were White, and vice versa. This type of ordinance was common throughout many Southern states at that time. The Buchanan case went to court, as Warley cited the ordinance as a reason why he couldn’t complete the purchase of the house. The court ultimately struck down the ordinance as unconstitutional.

Despite this ruling against direct racial segregation, cities did not pursue integration, and instead post-Buchanan zoning codes became one of the primary means to enforce segregation. Unlike the struck-down ordinances, zoning does not explicitly mention race. Nonetheless, Harland Bartholomew, the Saint Louis urban planner who wrote or consulted on hundreds of zoning plans in cities across North America, admitted the intent of his zoning plans was to seek racial and economic segregation. “According to Bartholomew, a St. Louis zoning goal was to ‘preserv[e] the more desirable residential neighborhoods,’ and to prevent movement into ‘finer residential districts … by colored people,’” legal historian Richard Rothstein writes. 

In 1919, Frederick Law Olmsted, a landscape architect and planner, stated in the 11th National Congress on City Planning that “apartment houses and multi-family houses should be assigned to specified districts, and single family houses should be in districts which have adequate protection against apartment houses.” This was to prevent the intermingling of people who lived in each type of dwelling, which typically aligned with class and race. According to Strong Towns, this was also considered to be a “moral” issue, with the character of the “American home” at stake, threatened by apartments.

At a high level, Fischel explains that zoning in the United States has had three main phases. At first, zoning was a tool that was very pro-developer. Developers were able to build relatively freely, without large amounts of pushback from homeowners or the public. Homes also retained relatively stable prices during this time.

In the second phase starting in the 1960s and 1970s NIMBYism arose much more strongly, coupled with the environmental movement. The NIMBY movement was characterized by community resistance to a large swathe of potential developments. The 1970s were also the time of the great inflation, with prices for houses rising rapidly. 

Fischel also says that when people have such a large amount of money in one particular asset, they become protective of that asset. Unlike a diversified stock portfolio, a house is an extremely concentrated investment. The investment of homeowners in their properties led to increased political involvement (what Fischel calls the “Homevoter Hypothesis”) and an influence on zoning codes and how they were used. This investment of homeowners can have positive effects, such as preserving or improving the neighborhood in ways that are considered to be desirable, as this increases the property value. 

However, the NIMBY movement also led to a resistance to any “undesirable” developments or encroachments on the neighborhood. This resistance included pushback against low-income housing, people from lower-socioeconomic groups, and racial discrimination, much like the segregationist policies of decades before. In a 1998 article, Raphaël Fischler explains that because “proximity to people of a lower social status diminished the market value of property, the stability of prices depended on the preservation of safe distances between socioeconomic racial groups.”

In the third phase, which is arising now, Fischel believes that the YIMBY movement has begun to shape the discourse around zoning and housing with “responsible communities, who realize ‘Uh oh, what were we thinking?’ … This sensible tool has gotten out of hand and is causing a lot of social problems.” Fishel says that the YIMBY movement is “emblematic” of larger societal shifts “… maybe it will be an important change.”

Zoning approaches are certainly in need of many adjustments. Samuel Stein, author of Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, explains that zoning at this point has become a tool that is overused by cities, with the zoning code in New York City ballooning “from a hundred pages to several thousand.” 

Stein explains that “we try to do more and more with zoning, because other means are less available. Zoning was not really supposed to be a tool of affordable housing production, for example, but because so many better ways of achieving affordability are off-limits to cities. This is either because the money isn’t there, or because there are preemptive laws that prevent them from doing things. So, they do it through zoning instead.”

Why Zoning Matters

So why does all of this matter? And are the old discriminatory approaches of zoning simply in the past? 

Using zoning as a tool to govern land use has shaped the urban landscape in a number of ways, many of which have both positive and negative consequences. Separating functions of land provides increased health benefits (i.e. being further away from a large steel factory), but in the absence of good public transport access, can increase sprawl and a reliance on cars. 

In addition, the single-family home is now culturally embedded in the idea of the American dream, which creates resistance to change. Sonia Hirt says that “there is a very deep American attachment that goes back to the time of William Penn, to the idea of living a private life.” The connection between single-family homes and the idea of a “private life” is clear. 

Nonetheless, Hirt explains that when it comes to planning and zoning, we cannot blame the issue only on culture. It’s “more complicated than this,” she says. “I don’t think we can just blame it on the people and be angry about it.”

Richard Kahlenberg, author of Excluded, agrees, saying that the cultural connection to the single-family home is there. However, he notes, “No one is saying that people who own a single-family home have to change and have to build a duplex. It’s just that they can’t prevent all their neighbors, who might choose to do that, from doing so.”

Aside from finger-pointing games, it is clear that zoning matters: its use as a racial and class discrimination tool has had a large number of effects that cannot be described as “in the past”. Many effects are generational, with consequences that continue to ripple out. In addition, exclusionary zoning is still present today, with zoning for single-family homes still predominating. A New York Times report found that in many neighborhoods and cities across the US, around 85% of the urban space is zoned for single-family housing. 

Interestingly, one study that examined the distribution of prohibitive zoning laws in California, found the most prohibitive zoning in areas that lean predominantly liberal. In addition, as noted by Kahlenberg in a piece written for The Atlantic in 2023, Jenny Schuetz’s work finds that “overly restrictive zoning is most prevalent and problematic along the West Coast and the Northeast corridor from Washington D.C. to Boston.” These areas — like most big U.S. cities — are predominantly run by Democrats. 

Omar Wasow, an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University said in a CNN interview that “There are people in the town of Princeton who will have a Black Lives Matter sign on their front lawn and a sign saying ‘We love our Muslim neighbors,’ but oppose changing zoning policies that say you have to have an acre and a half per house”. Kahlenberg explains that some of this has less to do with issues of race, and rather discrimination based on class: as Fareed Zakaria puts it, “the great sin of the modern left is elitism.”  

With housing prices prohibitively high in many places, and significant resistance to change even in apparently progressive communities, urbanists, communities, and city governments are all looking for answers.

Looking ahead to solutions

Zoning plays a complex role in the history of the United States, including as a vital aspect of enforcing racial and class segregation in many cities. It has also contributed to a swathe of single-family homes across the country, and prohibitively expensive housing for many people. The solutions to this issue have been somewhat elusive, although many are working on it. Some of the answers appear to be clear, but require consistent action at numerous governance levels.

In Part II of Zoning 101, we will take a look at solutions to the housing shortage that restrictive zoning policy has promoted. We’ll also go through a few examples of cities and how they are dealing with zoning issues.

The post Urbanism 101: Zoning’s History and Role in the Housing Crisis first appeared on The Urbanist.

It sounds simple enough, but it has not been without controversy, and the implementation of the concept comes with additional challenges. For example, all planning concepts require political buy-in and funding is necessary for changes to actually take place. In addition, even when changes are made, they don’t necessarily serve all populations equally or in a culturally-specific manner. Furthermore, infrastructure and neighborhood improvements can contribute to displacement of low-income communities and gentrification.

Nonetheless, improving walkability, traffic safety, access to services, and ensuring that people have viable options to get around other than cars, are all important and beneficial urban planning goals. This article will first discuss how the 15-Minute City concept is defined. Then, it will cover the communication of the concept and pushback against it. Finally, it will go through the metrics of the concept, the implementation, and the effects, followed by a couple of real-life examples both in Seattle and elsewhere.

What is a 15-Minute City?

The roots of the 15-minute city concept go back a long way, and can be found in planning approaches such as New Urbanism, Jane Jacobs’ models of neighborhood planning, transit-oriented development, and others. All of these focus on proximity of services as a key element of high-quality urban space. 

“There’s nothing new about the concept,” Emily Talen, professor of Urbanism at the University of Chicago, said. “I’m glad it’s taken off like it has, but this is completely central to what urban planning is about, which is putting people in proximity to the goods and services that they need. It’s just that simple.” 

Dick Ettema, professor of Urban Accessibility and Social Inclusion at Utrecht University concurred. “We have seen various elements of this 15-minute city idea already before. We have had Compact Cities in the Netherlands. We have had New Urbanism. We have walkable cities, livable streets, and complete streets,” Ettema said. “It’s an appealing story. It’s also a simplified story.”

Carlos Moreno, a Franco-Columbian urban planner and Sorbonne professor, pioneered the 15-minute city term, which was quickly adopted by and popularized by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo. Some of the key components include walkability, mixed-use buildings, bike lanes, public transport, and services such as supermarkets, doctors, schools, and parks. These should all be reachable within 15 minutes by foot or by bike. Other related concepts use different time frames or metrics to refer to a similar outcome, such as the “20-minute city”, the “20-minute neighborhood,” or the “one-mile city.” 

The intention is to improve the quality of life of residents, reduce carbon emissions, focus economic growth locally, increase active travel and health outcomes, and build strong communities.

Like some other urban developments such as bike lanes, bus lanes, or affordable housing, the 15-minute city concept has also faced pushback from conservatives, as well as conspiracy theories in both the UK and the US, particularly in response to the idea of reducing car dependency. This response is relatively unique, as most urban planning concepts do not draw such a large public reaction. The reasons behind this reaction seem to be multiple.

Devin Silvernail, former policy director for Seattle Councilmember Tammy Morales, helped promote 15-minute city style interventions in Seattle. 

“There was a misunderstanding that came particularly from one town in the UK,” Silvernail said, in which the 15-minute city concept was communicated poorly.“That [misunderstanding] spread, where people were saying, ‘You can’t drive through this neighborhood or you can’t park here, you can’t do this and you can’t do that.’ That’s what people heard, that some liberty they have, their movement, was being taken away. I think it really boils down to communication.”

Professor Ettema also agrees that the communication of the idea may have played a role: “If it’s about selling [an idea to the public], selling is often about simplifying. And while it makes it appealing for some, it may make it also more threatening to others.” 

Accessibility vs Walkability: 15 Minutes for Whom?

The 15-minute city is an intervention that is intended to increase walkability. However, a distinguishing point that is critical to note is that walkability is not the same as accessibility. 

As Anna Zivarts, Director of Disability Mobility Initiative at Disability Rights Washington, said: “A lot of places that people might consider walkable aren’t aren’t smooth, or they involve a lot of steps and so for folks who are using wheelchairs or walkers or canes like that can be really challenging.” 

Numerous walkable cities in Europe such as Amsterdam or Marseilles rate highly for walkability. However, these cities have numerous streets covered in cobblestones, with narrow footpaths. In the case of Amsterdam there is a high level of bicycle traffic, and in Marseilles there are many steps. 

These places may meet a 15-minute metric of “access to services,” but are not at all accessible for people with mobility devices such as wheelchairs or canes, as well as parents with prams or elderly people.

“[The 15-minute idea] sort of assumes that the distance someone could travel in 15 minutes is equal. But I don’t think people, who are not disabled, realize how much longer it can take someone who’s disabled to navigate a distance,” Zivarts said. “For some people, 15 minutes could be more like 45 minutes.” 

Without addressing concerns about accessibility and disability rights, cities that otherwise achieve the 15-minute ideal will have a big asterisk. To overcome this pitfall, cities should integrate accessibility into the 15-minute city concept, ensuring that pathways and transit are accessible for all, in addition to being high quality.

Barriers: Idea vs Implementation

In cases where urban areas might benefit from the 15-minute city concept, there are still a number of barriers. For example, in the US, Silvernail noted that there are big cultural barriers that prevent people from even necessarily wanting or considering the idea of the 15-minute city. “There is this very ingrained idea in the United States to say, well, you know, we’re not Barcelona, ​​we’re not Tokyo, we’re not Buenos Aires, and therefore it can’t happen here,” Silvernail said.

In addition, even if residents might want this idea, it always has to go through political hurdles, and the decision-makers are usually not at the neighborhood level that is primarily affected. City-wide or nation-wide decisions are made, governance levels at which the 15-minute city may not always be a primary concern. While individual initiatives or neighborhoods might be very keen, they don’t always have funding or any political power to make it happen.

“Unfortunately right now a lot of the ways that improvements get funded is through grants,: Zivarts said. “So communities have to go and apply to the state, or even the federal government for these grants. But you have to have a competitive application, and so you have to have people on staff who know how to write grant applications. And there are the communities that have the resources to do that and other communities that don’t.”

Wider implementation of 15-minute cities may also require easing zoning restrictions and other regulations, such as parking mandates, that slow down urban transformation. 

“We really need to change the rules of city building in the US.” Talen said. “There are small-scale developers who want to get in there and change the city, and they are getting blocked by zoning rules.” 

The Effects: Better Health, Quality of Life… and Gentrification?

Assuming that the 15-minute city actually gets implemented, having services in closer proximity and active multimodal travel options brings a number of benefits to the urban population. C40 Cities notes that the “physical and mental health benefits of active travel, cleaner air, easy access to healthy food options, quality green space, and stronger community ties that reduce loneliness are vast and well documented.” 

Unfortunately, the side effect of these improvements can be, in some cases, gentrification. However, it can be hard to know the direction of “causality” in such cases, Ettema said. For example, the area may already be gentrifying, and therefore provided with infrastructure improvements and investments. Or, these investments may actually cause the gentrification process. 

Devin Silvernail pointed to anti-displacement approaches that can help, such as ensuring that a large proportion of any new development or increased density includes social housing, and that additional services are appropriate for the existing population. 

“We need to ensure that we’re not putting in a Whole Foods [in working class neighborhoods],” Silvernail said. “Instead, we’re putting in something that is affordable to the people who live here.”

Ettema said that avoiding the narrow concentration of investments in infrastructure and amenities in one neighborhood (especially those vulnerable to displacement) but instead spreading them citywide, can potentially buffer displacement pressure.

Now let’s take a look at a few examples.

Seattle’s Plans and Potential

Adoption of the 15-minute city concept in Seattle has long been in discussion, but as of yet it appears that there is no concrete plan to adopt the approach. Instead, Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan 2015-2035 continues to focus on the “urban village” approach of planning, a concept that was adopted in Seattle in the 1990s. 

However, a 2021 moveBuddha study found that Seattle was somewhat of a 15-minute city already (it ranked #12 out of 25 cities studied). This was based on walking and biking scores, combined with other scores such as density of childcare, restaurants, and community services, as well as the affordability of housing. 

Another study by Nat Henry also showed that Seattle has some areas with high walkability and good access to parks, bus stops, restaurants and coffee shops. However, this map also showed that “only 44% of Seattleites can walk to basic city amenities,” and that “27 neighborhoods—including large portions of West Seattle, Delridge, and Northeast Seattle—are extremely unwalkable, with less than 10% of their residents able to walk to basic amenities.”

“Politically right now, Seattle is very skeptical about new things and bigger ideas,” Silvernail said. “There are bureaucratic barriers in place that are making it kind of difficult.” 

The challenge remains that transforming a potential 15-minute city into an intentional plan, with continual and specific steps in that direction, takes real political approval, financial resourcing, and planning.

Paris, the Poster Child

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo made headlines for her adoption of the 15-minute city approach. Some of her decisions and plans, such as pedestrianizing the Voie Georges-Pompidou, a large highway along the banks of the Seine, faced some pushback and controversy. Nonetheless, the rollout of bike lanes and walkable spaces under Hidalgo’s direction in Paris has been (so far), relatively effective. 

The French newspaper Le Monde reports that between October 2022 and October 2023, bicycle traffic monitored by sensors in Paris doubled. In addition, during rush hour, bicycles now outnumber cars. 

A study by the Paris Urbanism Agency (Apur) also found that walking increased by 50% between 2001 and 2018, that public transport overtook cars as the second-most popular means of transport (walking is in first place), and that “the rate of motorized households lowered generally: -17% in Paris, -5% in metropolitan municipalities outside Paris and a total of -7% for the Metropolis as a whole.” 

Many of these changes have been attributed to Hidalgo’s policies, showing a crucial shift in the urban experience in Paris. Nonetheless, a recent study from 2024 shows that the transformation in Paris is not yet complete, finding a “highly accessible city center (though with some internal differences in terms of types of amenities)” contrasted with “a less well-equipped periphery, where lower-income neighborhoods are more often found.” Even in the poster child for 15-minute cities, there is still a lot of work to be done.

Melbourne’s 20-Minute Neighborhoods

Another example of a city that is attempting to enact this concept under a slightly different moniker is Melbourne and its 20-minute neighborhoods. This initiative is being undertaken at the state level, with the Australian state of Victoria guiding the transformation of the city through the Plan Melbourne 2017–2050 strategy.

This includes safe, accessible and well-connected neighborhoods for pedestrians and cyclists, local services and destinations, high quality public spaces, and higher-density housing, among other things. On a positive note, the plan specifies what the 20 minute metric actually entails, stating that a “20-minute journey represents an 800 meter walk from home to a destination and back again or a 10-minute walk to your destination and 10 minutes back home.” 

The pilot programs and experiments with community partnerships have also informed the program further about how best to make and expand infrastructure improvements. Like other cities, interventions in Melbourne have applied more commonly in the inner city, while outer neighborhoods still require more investment.

The Roadmap is Clear

The 15-minute city idea is a new name for an old concept, but one that nonetheless does lead to improved health, quality of life, stronger communities, local economy improvements, and emissions reductions. There are also a number of challenges in the implementation of a 15-minute city, as well as unintended side effects, in some cases. 

Nonetheless, the benefits of 15-minute cities far outweigh the potential negative outcomes, particularly if development is done through an integrated and well-communicated process, that engages community and meets local needs. Cities like Melbourne and Paris are already showing the way.

The post Urbanism 101: 15-Minute Cities, Walkability, and Accessibility first appeared on The Urbanist.

Urban agriculture is one way to respond to this issue. By making use of parks, green spaces between buildings or in public areas, as well as private land such as rooftops or indoor environments, communities can grow food and sell or give this to others. Urban agriculture might look quite different from place to place.

In some areas, it might involve the use of large areas of unused or abandoned land or buildings to grow fruit and vegetables, while in other places gardens may be established primarily on rooftops or on balconies. Some farms produce a wide variety of low-cost or free produce for the purposes of food banks and community needs, while other growing operations might be focused on edible flowers and micro-greens, which are then sold at local restaurants.

What is urban agriculture?

From community gardens to urban farming, permaculture and green roofs, a lot of different terms are connected to the idea of urban agriculture. But as for what urban agriculture is, the definition can vary from quite broad, to very specific. Melissa Spear, the Executive Director at Tilth Alliance, a non-profit organization working to create equitable food systems in Washington, defines urban agriculture as simply “any activity that is growing food within a densely populated area. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be a city. It can also be a small town, or anything that’s not defined as rural.”

The difference between urban gardening and urban agriculture can also be one of scale: Dr. Sabine O’Hara, a professor at the University of the District of Columbia, explained that urban gardening is also a term often used for non-commercial activities, while urban farming or agriculture is a term that applies more to organizations who make above a certain earnings level from what they grow. The term “agriculture” tends to be used for larger activities, while “gardening” implies smaller communities or areas of land.

In all cases, a wide variety of plants can be grown in urban areas, particularly those that have shallow root systems, such as leafy greens, capsicums, tomatoes, herbs, and edible flowers. O’Hara notes that for many urban agriculture operations it can be crucial to have a mixture of high-earning and high-nutrient crops, so that the garden remains financially viable in the long run, as well as being able to serve the surrounding community.

What are the benefits of urban agriculture?

One of the main benefits of urban agriculture is that food is produced locally, allowing people in urban areas a higher level of food security and self-sufficiency. O’Hara said that for many urban populations, “it’s not only about food security and food access, but rather nutrition security and nutrition access. Not all food is created equal. How much access do we get to vitamins and unprocessed food, to fresh leafy greens that make a real difference in the dietary needs of people?” 

Urban agriculture is one way to bring these nutrient-dense foods closer to the communities who need them and to make those foods more accessible.

Urban gardening can also foster community, and encourage people to connect with others in their neighborhood. Shared gardening activities, investment in a collective project, and gatherings that arise as a result of urban garden events can all help people to make connections in the city. The mental health benefits of community interaction have also been touted by researchers as one way of combating the “loneliness epidemic” that many urban areas are facing.

In addition, the use and maintenance of green spaces for urban farming also contributes to permeable surfaces in the city. These surfaces can absorb water during times of rainfall, and release the moisture later (a concept known as a “sponge city” when applied widely across the urban space), and can help to reduce the urban heat island effect.

What are the challenges of urban agriculture?

O’Hara said it directly: “In urban agriculture, one of the biggest challenges is access to land and access to sufficient land.” Formal access to land can be made complicated with long or difficult procedures, and informal use of land risks resources and effort being removed or destroyed. In addition, land is often prohibitively expensive for people to purchase, and even more so in dense, urban spaces. Zoning rules also make particular areas completely off limits for certain activities, further complicating the access issue, but ways to overcome the obstacles exist.

“There are some ways of farming that require very, very little land, if you farm not in soil, but hydroponically or aquaponically,” O’Hara said. “This is what’s called ‘controlled environment agriculture,’ and then you actually don’t need a lot of land, and then the business models are really interesting.”

This can include the use of greenhouses (for example, set up in abandoned buildings), basements, and other indoor spaces. 

Spear also emphasized that regardless of which type of land or building is used, maintaining access to that land or building can also be a challenge, pointing to an example to illustrate the point.

“In Seattle, there was a BIPOC-led farm which was on church property,” Spear said. “They had been there and invested a lot of sweat equity into developing this small urban farm, but they [only] had a five-year lease. And then the lease was up, and the church was like, ‘Nope, we want to take over the space now,’ and that’s really rough. Having long-term access to land within urban centers is really tricky.”

Furthermore, water access can also be difficult. City water can be used, but in urban areas with high water prices and low access to water, gardens can’t always establish the access they need year-round. Spear ran into this issue back when she was working in Connecticut.

“We really worked hard in New Haven to get the city to provide water to community gardens at either a reduced rate or for free, and to actually put in spigots that didn’t freeze in the winter,” Spear said. “Connecticut gets really cold. So, [they needed] to put in a particular type of water spigot, that wouldn’t freeze in the winter, so that the community garden every year wouldn’t have to turn the water off in the winter.”

An additional challenge is something that arises with almost any kind of urban development: Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) activism. Spear said that when they set up their Rainier Beach Urban Farm project, some people in the neighbourhood didn’t want it.

“People were complaining, saying ‘you can’t put this here, this is terrible,’ but once you’re actually there, and people see the activities there, they [realize] there’s nothing scary or bad going on,” Spear said. “[Now] every time we have an event and I’m there, there are always people who are like, ‘I live right down the street and I had no idea!’ … but it takes a long time.”

Despite the challenges, numerous urban farms have established themselves both in Seattle and elsewhere, to meet the needs for food security of their local communities.

Beacon Food Forest, Seattle

One great example of urban agriculture in Seattle is Beacon Food Forest. Set up in agreement with the City of Seattle Department of Public Utilities, they have a number of key values that they hope to enact through their project. 

As Khalil I. Griffith, Site & Programs Director at Beacon Food Forest, said one of their main goals is to “alleviate a lot of that pressure that has been placed on us” in relation to food and nutrient access, especially for people in low income areas, such as those surrounding the Beacon Food Forest area.

“Especially now, I think it’s harder and harder for people to be able to afford produce, so we have this fresh food for people and they can come and take what they need or take what they want,” Griffith said.

Beacon Food Forest offers growing spaces that people can harvest and forage food from, P-Patches (small plots of land available for gardeners to plant in), educational events and community gatherings, and donates food to local food banks. 

Signage at Beacon Food Forest is offered in five languages. “We have a big population [in this area], where folks are mostly either first or second generation immigrants and their native language is not English,” Griffith said. Language barriers are also a challenge that was noted also by other urban agriculture organizations such as Tilth Alliance (below). 

Spear said that immigrants to the area are “often the ones who really start to recognize the value of urban agriculture and they will start their own small agricultural operations. And they are focused on culturally relevant foods,” so that their communities can improve food access and cook familiar meals. When other community gardens are established, including multilingual signage and planting culturally-relevant foods can help to ensure that immigrant communities are also able to access these spaces. 

Tilth Alliance, Seattle

Another project working with urban agriculture in Seattle is the Tilth Alliance. Tilth Alliance has helped to set up a number of gardens in Seattle, including the Bradner Gardens Park, Good Shepherd Center, McAuliffe Park, and Rainier Beach Urban Farm & Wetlands. This urban farm and wetlands is Seattle’s largest urban farm.

The Alliance provides a number of programs both managing community gardens and urban farms in Seattle, as well as offering educational events, training, outreach programs, cooking programs, and other services. They also actively try to encourage diversity in their community, and provide support for people in marginalized groups, such as the elderly.

“We have a very robust senior meal program, centred around the East African community in Seattle, which is a very large immigrant community. That meal program cooks their meals twice a week at Rainier Beach Urban Farm,” Spear said. “It’s grown to be around a hundred seniors that come to the site.” In addition, they offer a culturally relevant plant start program, in which horticultural experts work out what’s missing in terms of the crop offering for local communities, and what immigrant groups are looking for.

Prinzessinnengärten, Berlin

Urban gardens and farms are an international phenomenon. One such garden in Berlin began as a pilot in 2009, the Prinzessinnengärten (Princess gardens). The site on which the garden was built had been “a wasteland for over half a century” — one example of transforming an abandoned space into a community garden.

The garden now grows organic herbs and vegetables in raised beds made from recycled Tetra Paks, rice sacks, and crates, and transforms additional unused or abandoned urban places (such as building sites, car parks, and roofs) into green meeting spaces and farmland. The entire Prinzessinnengärten was designed to be portable if necessary — a feature that was eventually needed in 2020, when the garden moved from Moritzplatz to the site of the former Neuer St. Jacobi cemetery.

The garden’s primary goal is to provide educational and community opportunities, including planting, growing and harvesting, beekeeping, making compost, and learning about participatory urban development.

Looking ahead

As for what’s next on the horizon for urban agriculture, both Beacon Food Forest and Tilth Alliance have specific goals for their farms, as well as for the movement more broadly. 

Griffith said that their next plan is to make Beacon Food Forest more accessible, as he explains “accessibility could have been thought about more [from the beginning] but other priorities were getting us space established, having a place for food.” Now, they want to improve access to the garden “in our neighborhood, where we have a lot of other folks with mobility access issues. … They need [the garden] just as much as we do.”

Even more so, Griffith hopes that by improving accessibility, they will improve the diversity of the community within the garden itself: “A big part of [our goal] is diversity. … You know the more diverse the voices are in the room, the better chances you have of ensuring that all the boxes are checked. There’s somebody there to be like well, hold on guys.” This can help to ensure that the project continues to develop in a welcoming, diverse, community-focused way that caters to everyone’s needs.

Tilth Alliance also has more plans to sustain and expand the food access components of their work. In particular, they offer a farm stand at which people can claim $20 worth of free produce. The food sourced for the farm stand is also only procured from small, hyper-local, organic, and primarily immigrant farms. In addition, a new initiative they are expanding into is seed saving, with a particular focus on culturally-relevant foods for their community, and organic seeds.

“We are now creating seed libraries where people can share seeds that they’ve saved,” Spear said. “Within the urban context that’s actually very important, in particular, when you’re trying to preserve the biodiversity of food that is being grown in urban centers.”

Urban gardening and the “buy local” movement is also becoming more popular. “When food is grown at a far distance from where it is consumed, then you also need a coal chain, right?” O’Hara said. “So there is a huge carbon footprint associated with that.” 

With increasing concerns about climate change and transport emissions, buying locally and supporting urban farms and community gardens has become increasingly common for restaurants, cafes, and events. O’Hara also notes the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, which, she said “really taught us a lesson or two about the vulnerability of supply chains.” 

In addition, when some fruits and vegetables are easily perishable, such as lettuce, spinach, and other greens, it makes practical sense for communities to buy these locally instead of transporting them in. As urban agriculture becomes more established, communities and businesses are able to more easily make the “buy local” choice.

But Spear said that the core of urban agriculture is much more than just growing food: “The food may come out of the farm, but it’s more about the whole process of growing, harvesting, and eating together in communities. There are so many benefits: there are health benefits, both physical health and mental health benefits, there’s social benefits, there’s just enjoying a good meal. The feeling of putting a seed in the ground, watching it grow, harvesting a tomato, and eating it. There’s nothing like it. You can say: ‘I did this, I grew this amazing tomato’, and I think that that’s kind of at the heart of it actually.”

The post Urbanism 101: How Urban Agriculture Can Boost Food Security first appeared on The Urbanist.

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Urban projects can take a significant amount of time and financing to implement. However, due to increasing pressures such as climate change, population influxes, and a widespread desire to create walkable, bicycle-friendly neighborhoods, more rapid approaches are often needed. Tactical urbanism is an approach that makes use of short-term pop-up projects to showcase an urban change, often led by citizen initiatives and protest groups.

These tactical projects provide an opportunity to see urban change in action, without requiring significant amounts of time, funding, or planning permissions. Some tactical urbanism projects are facilitated and approved by the city government, while others, known as guerrilla urbanism, are citizen-led initiatives not approved by the city, often directly in contravention of city bylaws and regulations. 

These initiatives have the intention of making temporary changes that can show how a more permanent project would play out.

What Defines Tactical Urbanism?

Tactical urbanism has a number of key features. The Tactical Urbanist’s Guide defines tactical urbanism as a process of setting up “flexible and short-term projects to advance long-term goals related to street safety, public space, and more.” They note that it consists of a “city, citizen-led, and/or organizational approach to neighborhood-building using short-term, low-cost, and scalable interventions to catalyze long-term change.” This can include projects such as pop-up parks, marketplaces, or pedestrian plazas. 

For example, during the Covid pandemic a number of cities set up pop-up bike lanes to encourage people to cycle instead of taking crowded public transport, and to allow cyclists more space between each other on the roads. One project in Berlin, Germany was deemed a particular success, with a number of the pop-up bike lanes being made permanent after the project’s end. Many Parisian pandemic bike lanes are on the way to becoming permanent fixtures as well.

Another common occurrence was the shift from indoor dining to outdoor pop-up restaurants, among other outdoor pop-up parks and areas for people to socialize while still being able to maintain distance from each other. Seattle embraced this trend, leading to a transformation of Ballard Avenue, for example.

When led by a city or official organization, these approaches are approved by the municipal or city government. Some citizen-led approaches are done without approval, also known as guerrilla urbanism. These projects are sometimes considered “unsanctioned, unscripted, and seemingly ‘undesirable’ activities,” such as taking over vacant land and turning it into playgrounds or social gathering areas, occupying streets or other public spaces, making bike lanes out of human chains of people linking hands, or simply painting crossworks or bike lanes on roads where activists deem them necessary. 

A number of examples of tactical and guerrilla urbanism show the popularity of these approaches, and the potential they have for facilitating, encouraging, and solidifying lasting urban change.

Park(ing) Day

One such well-known example of tactical urbanism is the demonstration known as Park(ing) Day, which started in San Francisco. Park(ing) Day is an urban protest or demonstration that describes itself as a “global, public, participatory project where people across the world temporarily repurpose curbside parking spaces and convert them into public parks and social spaces to advocate for safer, greener, and more equitable streets for people.”

It began originally as a guerrilla art project that has transformed into a much larger movement for urban transformation. The Park(ing) Day events are part of a hope to prompt further discussions about how we make use of public space in urban areas, and how much of that public space is allocated to cars and car parks. 

Ghost Bikes

Another example of tactical urbanism in action is the installation of ghost bikes throughout the city. These ghost bikes are a form of memorial for people killed by motorists or in other cycling collisions, to highlight road infrastructure that may need to be made safer. The Guardian notes that “ghost bikes aim to act as both a memorial—they feature the name of the dead rider and other details, whether on a sign or painted to the frame — and a cautionary reminder for cyclists and drivers about what can happen when a bike and a vehicle come into contact.”

Ghost bikes have been popping up around the world since 2003, and initially their placement occurred as a “defiant or subversive act, a kind of guerilla street art that city officials removed quickly, sometimes within days.” Over time, their placement has become more common and more accepted, as both memorial sites and a silent protest for urban change.

Seattle Department of Transportation and Crosswalks

In Seattle, the lack of tolerance for particular instances of guerrilla urbanism was widely covered by the media, in the case of the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) and their reaction to an unsanctioned crosswalk. Bloomberg notes that a “group of residents of the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood painted it themselves. Two days later, Seattle Department of Transportation workers were at the scene, power-washing the zebra stripes into oblivion.”

This was in stark contrast to SDOT’s lack of action to so-called “eco-blocks,” unsanctioned horizontal concrete blocks which prevent large vehicles from parking in front of businesses. The public outcry was widespread, as transportation agencies were seen to be spending “more urgency removing citizen-built crosswalks than they do installing official ones.” The legitimacy of tactical urbanism and guerrilla urbanism is often hotly contested by residents and the municipality.

Looking ahead

Tactical urbanism is one way for city governments to pilot projects and to take short-term, low-cost action to determine the viability of an urban change. Citizen-led approaches and guerrilla urbanism can equally facilitate these changes, and can highlight pre-existing failures and issues with the use or allocation of urban spaces. The use of both pop-up and short-term projects driven by city governments, and the citizen-led demonstrations and protests, can contribute to major urban transformation, and play a significant role in highlighting pre-existing insufficiencies as well as urban potential, and the underlying need for the continuing reformation of public space.

If city governments do not lead on street transformation to better serve their residents and promote safety, they might find themselves beset with more guerilla urbanism projects as residents take matters into their own hands frustrated after decades of failing to shift the car-centered paradigm.

The post Urbanism 101: Tactical Urbanism first appeared on The Urbanist.

You should get a bingo card when attending a city planning conference. Instead of numbers, the squares should have pop-planning phrases to be crossed off as you hear them in lectures. Maslow’s Hierarchy and Jacob’s ‘eyes on the street’ will often get a mention. Someone using Legos to illustrate floor-area-ratio. There will be a misunderstanding of topography. Get five in a row, and you can win a ESRI tote bag.

And at the middle, the free space, should be Daniel Burnham’s “Make No Little Plans” quote. It will be the pull quote on an opening or closing slide, it’s just a matter of when.

Burnham, of course, was the late 19th/early 20th-century architect that made everything pretty and electric. Pushing the Beaux-Arts movement, he used modern construction to make the big buildings, and then covered the outside with symmetrical sculptures, gold leaf, and light bulbs. The pinnacle was the White City at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the long stretch of regal buildings that excluded non-whites and were actually just stucco. He also designed New York’s Flatiron Building and Washington D.C.’s Union Station, and accentuated anything that was stone with an archway or three at the beginning of the 20th century. 

That Chicago Exposition was an attention getter, and like many big name architects, Burnham parlayed his fame into drawing an entire city. It was a maneuver that many architects take on once famous, from Le Corbusier to Frank Lloyd Wright. The architect’s career arc tends to be residence, church, coffee table book, then city plan. Burnham’s was for Chicago, with forays to St. Louis and San Francisco.

The whole quote from Burnham goes like this: “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever growing insistency.”

Unfortunately, aiming high completely detaches from the ground. What’s absolutely apparent in many of these utopian city plans is bleak emptiness. It doesn’t matter how many trees they add or how many posed humans they drop onto a sidewalk, the place is cold. And that’s because the point of the Big Plan is the Big Plan rather than the people who live there. This isn’t a place to live, it’s a machine.

At his heart, I think of Daniel Burnham as a Victorian living in America. Awe inspiring leaps of technology and the posh appearance of upper middle-classness, built on a machine greased by grinding small people to death. When one thinks of The White City, it should be discussed in the same breath as Charles Dickens. They’re flip sides of the same coin. Tiny Tim is a warning about the steam engine to which Burnham applies a pretty painted stucco facade.

The alternative to a Burnham Big Plan, naturally, should be small plans. Hundreds of little concepts that can be focused and really reflect the ideas of a specific block or community. Unfortunately, these tend to just be shoots off an original stem, together assembling into a roving bamboo forest of bureaucracy with hurdles keeping regular folks from participating in their neighborhoods. 

Many of us live in places where such overplanning completely misses the daily lives of people on the ground. These are cities as coloring books, where design review boards or overwrought civic ego projects set hard lines and regular mooks like us are left to fill in the actual color and life among what’s left over. Where regular people’s lives are still allowed to occur, there’s some liveliness. Where the interactions are sparse or difficult, we have Medina.

Also, like Burnham’s quote emphasizes, the goal of Big Plans is to lock in those indelible lines and assert dead hand control long into the future. Big Plans are about remembering the design (and the designer) at the expense of the people who live there now.

The actual alternative to Burnhamism is a Little or No Plan, best summed up by Kurt Vonnegut. He said, “We are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.” Regardless of where we are, our living city emerges from a couple thousand people spending the day going about their lives. We meet. We eat. We work. We sleep. We fart around. It’s not that we have no plans for ourselves for the day or year. It’s that our individual plans are not based on the Big Plans of the city beyond finding a convenient way to get our morning cup of coffee. Working to dismantle barriers to that and other daily tasks should be the peak of planning and civic duty.

Such a Little or No Plan perspective is a departure from Burnham in other ways than just being more limited and human. It comes from a healthier, post-Victorian understanding of how the world works. The image of a monarch (political or architectural) controlling everything used to be projected beyond politics, from the universe to ecology to finances. Now we know that humans are the exception to seeing centralized control. Even ants and bees don’t operate by order of a queen, it’s individuals living their lives that build massive hills and hives. Big plans, like powerful queens, were a historic fluke. 

Planners and architects struggle because we’re some of the few professions whose job it is to try and wrap our heads around massive, complex systems. More often than not, we get to some manageable level of that understanding. Our challenge is to resist using that understanding against people in service of our own ego. 

Our job is to see those immense civic gears and make sure they’re not grinding individuals to dust. Burnham and his contemporaries simply didn’t care. They were happy to completely demolish swaths of homes, and more happy that their backwards and overbearing plans are still screwing with people’s lives. We can do so much better by simply appreciating the importance of little or no plans. Humans fart around. The best cities, and best plans, have plenty of free spaces for it.

The post In Defense of Little or No Plans first appeared on The Urbanist.

“In the era of rapid urbanization and evolving urban landscapes, the development of effective zoning ordinances has become an essential aspect of urban planning. These regulations shape the future of cities, determining land use, building codes, and overall community development. Traditionally, crafting a zoning ordinance required countless hours of manual research, analysis, and drafting, by teams of urban planners and legal experts. However, with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP), a groundbreaking new approach has taken center stage: ChatGPT, an advanced language model developed by OpenAI.”

So, would begin this article, if I let ChatGPT have its way. When asked to write an article about AI writing zoning ordinances, it produced the above paragraph and five more. It helpfully added the title “ChatGPT Revolutionizes Zoning Ordinance Creation: A Step Towards Efficient Urban Planning.”

Though touting its “remarkable precision and efficiency, providing urban planners and decision-makers with valuable insights and recommendations” the actual output of ChatGPT’s attempt to write a zoning ordinance will assure every planner that their job is safe. Unless they don’t want it to be.

Asking ChatGPT for a zoning ordinance is kind of astounding. Using the prompt “you are a code writer for a local government, prepare a text of a zoning ordinance to produce dense, affordable housing, with plenty of trees, greenspace and walkability.” The bot offered 750 words defining terms, developing zoning district designations, and setting penalties for failing to comply with the ordinance. A second prompt added a similarly sized and detailed subdivision ordinance. I’ve included the text at the end of this article. If only our adopted land use ordinances topped out at five pages.

The AI ordinances sound pretty good and mostly complete on first read. The new rules create a high density residential district, a mixed-use district, and a greenspace district. There are provisions for adoption, a spiffy sounding purpose section, and severability clauses. It throws in floor area ratios and some bioswales that no one requested. And dang if that AI doesn’t hit on the Planners Love for Abbreviating Things (PLAT). 

But like fingers on a generated painting, a few misnomers and the fake becomes apparent. It defines tree. The structure is an outline without a purpose, dropping into ordered lists at weird places. The greenspace zone is missing in later parts, among other incomplete distances or useful definitions of concepts like “close proximity.” In general, it fulfills the assessment that ChatGPT (at least the publicly available 3.5 version) writes like a checked-out 11th grader. Or Master of Urban Planning (MUP) intern. So it would be an absolute mistake to try and apply this to a city.

The exercise, however, is quite useful. It uses the weaknesses of natural language processors like ChatGPT to highlight the weaknesses of planners. 

Natural language processors like ChatGPT are trained on reams of data. It looks for logical connections between the words presented, and pulls them out when presented with a prompt that demands it. Or, when asked (then asked again for a 20-word response) ChatGPT puts it: “The process involves understanding the prompt, retrieving relevant knowledge, reasoning, generating a response, iteratively refining it, and delivering it effectively to the user.” That retrieval part is important, because it’s a dataset fed to the machine by humans.

The problem here is that the AI is accessing a lot of data, so it’s necessary to identify what the data is to make any sense of the output that’s been offered. In her book You Look Like a Thing And I Love You, AI researcher Janelle Shane points out the disconnect while discussing predictive policing, or using past records to predict time and location of crimes to allot more patrols: “The algorithm is not predicting where the most crime will occur; it’s predicting where the most crime will be detected. If there are more police sent to a particular neighborhood, more crime will be detected there than in a lightly policed but equally crime ridden neighborhood.” Like corporate boardrooms. 

ChatGPT was filled with data from across the internet in September 2021. That includes a lot of ordinances and land use legislation of a specific flavor: the text of ordinances that passed or were considered. There’s little history because the codes get overwritten and few new ideas because they don’t get published, just passed legislation and most of it current. We can see that in the technical severability and effective date clauses the AI felt fit to include.

So the bot is not drawing words from ordinances that successfully built cities. It’s drawing words from ordinances that successfully ran today’s political gauntlet and got adopted. There is no tie between the success of these words and the successful development of good neighborhoods. This is a best practices document in politics, not in urbanism. 

These are also the words on average likely to follow the one before. It excludes outliers and drifts towards most probable. In his book Team Human, Douglas Rushkoff highlights the issue with algorithms trending towards the middle. He uses the example of hollowing the punk ethos to a mohawk and patches because 80% of punks wore them. Thrash all you want, it was the 20% of punks who likely skipped the look that made the anti-establishment, mutual aid ethos important. “We are using algorithms to eliminate that 20%: the anomalous behaviors that keep people unpredictable, weird and diverse.” 

Unfortunately, pseudo best practices and average thinking are what planners do best. The history of zoning in America is copy-paste of the things that get passed and work just good enough. We’re doing it again in Washington with a complete farce of a missing middle housing handbook. It’s an issue Jane Jacobs warned about, calling urbanists to seek the “unaverage,” leaving behind the city-as-math problem to reveal the essential processes of the city’s organized complexity.

It is almost straight copy paste, @wacommerce
I support recycling, but I hope we got a discount!!! pic.twitter.com/CAUD0maxjs

— Matt Hutchins (@HutchinsMatt) May 22, 2023

There is a way to have artificial intelligence unleash a truly groundbreaking approach to zoning, and that’s to do the things humans just are not able to undertake. It could be deep-dive research into deed records over time. It could be untangling zoning terms from economic cycles. It’s just not writing ordinances. As Janelle Shane points out, “To take the best way forward with AI, we’ll have to understand it – understand how to choose the right problems for it to solve, how to anticipate its misunderstandings, and how to prevent it from copying the worst of what it finds in human data.” 

Planners can unleash AI, but only when we can honestly identify the worst of what we do. That’s because, when we try to extract lessons from a giant Voltron of zoning ordinances we wrote, we’re talking to ourselves. Land use ordinances are reflections of our biases, whether its against a certain style of development or towards the politically expedient. These AI zoning and subdivision ordinances are just yelling them back at us.

PROMPT: You are a code writer for a local government. Prepare the text of a zoning ordinance to produce dense, affordable housing with plenty of trees, greenspace, and walkability.

Zoning Ordinance: Promoting Dense, Affordable Housing with Trees, Greenspace, and Walkability

Section 1: Purpose
The purpose of this zoning ordinance is to promote the development of dense, affordable housing while ensuring the preservation and enhancement of trees, greenspace, and walkability within our local government. By creating vibrant, sustainable communities, we aim to improve the quality of life for residents, foster social cohesion, and protect the environment.

Section 2: Definitions
2.1 Dense, Affordable Housing: Residential developments characterized by a higher number of housing units per acre, designed to provide affordable housing options to individuals and families across various income levels.

2.2 Trees: Mature woody perennial plants typically characterized by a single stem or trunk supporting a crown of branches and leaves.

2.3 Greenspace: Open areas within residential developments that are primarily covered by vegetation, including but not limited to parks, playgrounds, and community gardens.

2.4 Walkability: The ease and safety with which pedestrians can access amenities, services, and public spaces within a neighborhood or development.

Section 3: Zoning Districts and Designations
3.1 High-Density Residential Districts (HDRD): These districts shall be designated to encourage the development of dense, affordable housing with an emphasis on providing an adequate number of housing units per acre.

3.2 Mixed-Use Districts (MXD): These districts shall encourage a mix of residential, commercial, and recreational uses, promoting walkability by allowing residents to access essential services within walking distance.

3.3 Green and Open Space Districts (GOSD): These districts shall be designated to preserve and enhance greenspace and ensure the availability of public parks, community gardens, and other recreational areas.

Section 4: Development Standards and Guidelines
4.1 Density and Affordable Housing Requirements:
4.1.1 HDRD: Minimum density requirements for high-density residential developments shall be [insert specific number] housing units per acre. A certain percentage of these units shall be designated as affordable housing, as determined by the local government's affordable housing policy.
4.1.2 MXD: Mixed-use developments should allocate a portion of residential units for affordable housing, in accordance with the local government's affordable housing policy.

4.2 Tree Preservation and Planting:
4.2.1 All new developments shall conduct a comprehensive tree inventory to identify and protect existing mature trees within the project area.
4.2.2 For each unit constructed, developers shall be required to plant a minimum of [insert specific number] trees, as determined by the size of the development site.

4.3 Greenspace Requirements:
4.3.1 For every housing unit constructed, developers shall allocate a specific percentage of the site as greenspace, including areas for parks, playgrounds, and community gardens.
4.3.2 Greenspaces shall be easily accessible to residents and designed to promote outdoor activities and community interaction.

4.4 Walkability:
4.4.1 Developments shall incorporate pedestrian-friendly design elements, such as sidewalks, crosswalks, and pedestrian pathways, to ensure safe and convenient access to amenities and public spaces.
4.4.2 Mixed-use districts should prioritize a walkable layout, with a mix of residential, commercial, and recreational establishments located within close proximity to each other.

Section 5: Incentives and Benefits
5.1 Density Bonus Program:
5.1.1 Developers who exceed the minimum density requirements set forth in this ordinance may be eligible for density bonuses, such as increased floor area ratios, expedited permitting processes, or financial incentives.

5.2 Expedited Review and Permitting:
5.2.1 Affordable housing developments meeting the local government's criteria shall be given priority in the review and permitting process, ensuring a streamlined process for their construction.

5.3 Fee Waivers and Reductions:
5.3.1 The local government may consider waiving or reducing certain fees associated with the development of affordable housing or projects that incorporate significant trees, greenspace, and walkability features.

Section 6: Implementation and Enforcement
6.1 Planning and Zoning Department:
6.1.1 The local government's Planning and Zoning Department shall be responsible for administering and enforcing this zoning ordinance, ensuring compliance with the specified requirements.

6.2 Compliance and Penalties:
6.2.1 Failure to comply with this ordinance may result in penalties, fines, or the revocation of permits. The local government shall have the authority to enforce these penalties as deemed necessary.

Section 7: Severability
If any provision or section of this ordinance is found to be invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions shall remain in effect.

Section 8: Effective Date
This zoning ordinance shall become effective immediately upon approval by the local government and shall apply to all new developments and substantial renovations from the effective date onward.

Note: The above zoning ordinance is a generalized framework. Please consult with legal experts, urban planners, and other relevant stakeholders to tailor the ordinance to your specific local government's needs, legal requirements, and community preferences.

PROMPT: Based on the above zoning rules, please prepare a subdivision ordinance. 

Subdivision Ordinance: Promoting Sustainable and Vibrant Communities

Section 1: Purpose
The purpose of this subdivision ordinance is to establish regulations and guidelines for the orderly and sustainable development of subdivisions within our local government. By promoting thoughtful design, preserving natural resources, and ensuring the provision of essential infrastructure, we aim to create vibrant, livable neighborhoods that enhance the quality of life for residents.

Section 2: Definitions
2.1 Subdivision: The division of a tract or parcel of land into two or more lots or parcels for the purpose of sale, lease, or development.

2.2 Developer: The individual, group, or entity responsible for proposing and implementing the subdivision project.

Section 3: General Requirements
3.1 Preliminary Subdivision Plan:
3.1.1 Prior to the commencement of any subdivision project, the developer shall submit a preliminary subdivision plan to the local government's Planning and Zoning Department for review and approval.
3.1.2 The preliminary plan should include proposed lot layout, road networks, utilities, greenspaces, and provisions for tree preservation and walkability.

3.2 Lot Design and Layout:
3.2.1 Lots shall be designed to ensure efficient land use while considering environmental factors, such as topography, drainage patterns, and existing vegetation.
3.2.2 Minimum lot sizes and dimensions shall be established, taking into account the desired density, greenspace requirements, and affordable housing objectives.

3.3 Infrastructure:
3.3.1 Adequate provisions for water supply, sewage disposal, stormwater management, and utility services shall be incorporated into the subdivision design.
3.3.2 Road networks shall be planned to accommodate anticipated traffic volumes, promote connectivity, and ensure pedestrian safety.

Section 4: Environmental Considerations
4.1 Tree Preservation:
4.1.1 Developers shall conduct a thorough tree inventory to identify and protect significant trees within the subdivision area.
4.1.2 The subdivision design should strive to retain existing trees and incorporate them into the layout to preserve the aesthetic value and environmental benefits they provide.

4.2 Greenspace and Recreation:
4.2.1 Subdivisions shall include dedicated greenspaces, such as parks, playgrounds, and community gardens, designed to enhance the overall quality of life for residents.
4.2.2 The size and location of greenspaces should be determined based on the anticipated population density and the need for accessible recreational areas.

Section 5: Design Standards
5.1 Road Design:
5.1.1 Roadways within subdivisions shall be designed to accommodate safe and efficient vehicular circulation, pedestrian walkways, and bicycle lanes, promoting walkability and connectivity.
5.1.2 Sidewalks and street trees shall be incorporated to enhance the streetscape and provide a comfortable environment for pedestrians.

5.2 Stormwater Management:
5.2.1 Subdivisions shall incorporate stormwater management techniques to mitigate potential flooding, erosion, and water quality impacts.
5.2.2 Stormwater retention ponds, bioswales, or other appropriate measures should be included to manage and treat stormwater runoff.

Section 6: Review and Approval Process
6.1 Subdivision Review:
6.1.1 The local government's Planning and Zoning Department shall review the preliminary subdivision plan, considering compliance with the provisions outlined in this ordinance.
6.1.2 The review process may include consultation with relevant agencies, public hearings, and opportunities for public input.

6.2 Approval and Conditions:
6.2.1 Upon satisfactory review, the local government shall approve the subdivision plan, subject to any necessary conditions or modifications to ensure compliance with applicable regulations and the best interests of the community.

Section 7: Compliance and Enforcement
7.1 Inspections and Monitoring:
7.1.

1 The local government shall conduct inspections at various stages of the subdivision project to ensure compliance with the approved plans and applicable regulations.
7.1.2 Non-compliance may result in penalties, fines, or the suspension of further development activities until corrective actions are taken.

7.2 Maintenance and Bonding:
7.2.1 The developer shall be responsible for maintaining and repairing subdivision infrastructure, including roads, utilities, and greenspaces, for a specified period after completion.
7.2.2 The local government may require the posting of performance bonds or other financial assurances to ensure the fulfillment of maintenance obligations.

Section 8: Severability
If any provision or section of this subdivision ordinance is found to be invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions shall remain in effect.

Section 9: Effective Date
This subdivision ordinance shall become effective immediately upon approval by the local government and shall apply to all new subdivision projects initiated from the effective date onward.

Note: The above subdivision ordinance is a generalized framework. Please consult with legal experts, urban planners, and other relevant stakeholders to tailor the ordinance to your specific local government's needs, legal requirements, and community preferences.

The post Let the Robots Write the Ordinance first appeared on The Urbanist.