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Thread: How Zoning Laws Are Holding Back America's Cities

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    How Zoning Laws Are Holding Back America's Cities

    Not really a good title for the theme of this video, which is, superficially, that zoning laws raise rents higher than many even most of the poor cannot afford, but deeper how the modernist in architecture starting in the 1920s, 1930s started designing cities with intellectual aesthetics in mind over and above any consideration of the people who would live there. This is also the theme of James C Scott's Seeing Like a State who looks at what he calls the high modernists following Le Corbusier architecture for great vast cities like Brasilia. Scott goes further and discusses how the same high modernists designed forests and farms from Germany to the US to the Soviet Union to Africa all of which failed to take into consideration local environment and people and knowledge and failed.

    Anyway, decent video on the topic.



    (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pq-UvE1j1Q)
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    Jane Jacobs is cited in the video and is prominent in Scott's book. Here she is in an essay from 1958, Downtown is for People, on the many project cropping up in American cities:

    ...What will the projects look like? They will be spacious, parklike, and uncrowded. They will feature long green vistas. They will be stable and symmetrical and orderly. They will be clean, impressive, and monumental. They will have all the attributes of a well-kept, dignified cemetery. And each project will look very much like the next one: the Golden Gateway office and apartment center planned for San Francisco; the Civic Center for New Orleans; the Lower Hill auditorium and apartment project for Pittsburgh; the Convention Center for Cleveland; the Quality Hill offices and apartments for Kansas City; the downtown scheme for Little Rock; the Capitol Hill project for Nashville. From city to city the architects’ sketches conjure up the same dreary scene; here is no hint of individuality or whim or surprise, no hint that here is a city with a tradition and flavor all its own.

    These projects will not revitalize downtown; they will deaden it. For they work at cross-purposes to the city. They banish the street. They banish its function. They banish its variety. There is one notable exception, the Gruen plan for Fort Worth; ironically, the main point of it has been missed by the many cities that plan to imitate it. Almost without exception the projects have one standard solution for every need: commerce, medicine, culture, government—whatever the activity, they take a part of the city’s life, abstract it from the hustle and bustle of downtown, and set it, like a self-sufficient island, in majestic isolation.

    There are, certainly, ample reasons for redoing downtown–falling retail sales, tax bases in jeopardy, stagnant real-estate values, impossible traffic and parking conditions, failing mass transit, encirclement by slums. But with no intent to minimize these serious matters, it is more to the point to consider what makes a city center magnetic, what can inject the gaiety, the wonder, the cheerful hurly-burly that make people want to come into the city and to linger there. For magnetism is the crux of the problem. All downtown’s values are its byproducts. To create in it an atmosphere of urbanity and exuberance is not a frivolous aim....
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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