Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2013
Publication Information
78 Brook. L. Rev. 571 (2013).
Abstract
Thanks to the growing influence of the new urbanists- a group of architects aid urban-planning professionals who promote the development of mixed-land-use neighborhoods- "transect zoning" is becoming the zoning reform du jour. Over the last few decades, the new urbanists have mounted a remarkably successful public-relations campaign against traditional zoning practices and the suburban land use patterns that they mandate. The new urbanists' case against zoning is part antisuburban polemic and part pro-urban philosophy. At heart, the new urbanists' claim is that cities are good for us-and suburbs are bad. Or, to put the claim into social-science terminology, the new urbanists argue that cities generate social capital by drawing together strangers who would not otherwise connect, while suburbs inhibit social capital by further privatizing our already-atomized culture. Thus, it follows that zoning laws that mandate a single-land- use, "suburban" built environment ought to be scrapped. These claims build, in important ways, upon Jane Jacobs's enormously influential book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs wrote at the apex of the urban-renewal period-a time when urban-planning ideology and practices strongly favored imposing single-land-use patterns on our cities, even to the point of demolishing mixed-land-use communities in order to replace and modernize them. She vehemently rejected the conventional wisdom that dense, mixed-land-use urban neighborhoods were hopelessly antiquated and unhealthy. On the contrary, she argued that mixed-land-use urban neighborhoods are critical to city life because commercial land uses both generate social capital and guarantee a steady supply of "eyes upon the street" to monitor and keep disorder and crime in check.
Recommended Citation
Nicole S. Garnett,
Redeeming Transect Zoning?,
78 Brook. L. Rev. 571 (2013)..
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/1808
Comments
Abstract from introduction.