Happy New Year!
This week we’re joined by Cornell University Professor Sara Bronin to talk about her book Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World.
We chat about all the ways that land is regulated and why zoning is an opportunity for people to reshape their communities. We also chat about food policy, connecting the street to property and the relationship between land and natural systems.
Scroll down below the audio player for an edited excerpt of our conversation, or click here for an unedited, AI-generated transcript of the entire conversation.
Jeff Wood: How much do you think streets should play a part in this? Because there’s the private realm, which is privately owned properties and those types of things that go into zoning regulations and stuff like that. But then there’s, like, streets and the public space, the public realm that in a lot of cities is like 30 percent or so of the land that’s being used in the city.
Sara Bronin: Chapter 6 of my book actually talks a lot about streets. I had to look that up. That chapter actually talks about movement, a later chapter talks about street design itself.
There are two chapters that really focus on transportation. One aspect of streets is the way that buildings interact with streets, and the opportunities that buildings and development provide to enhance the infrastructure and transportation patterns. For example, right now, most zoning codes around the country have minimum parking requirements that say that for everything you want to build, you have to build parking on your lot — and it gives a formula and then you have to go out and pave your lot. Or build a parking garage to satisfy the zoning codes parking requirements. In Hartford, we turned that around and said you don’t need any car parking, but you should have bike parking.
You should have showers for people who have come back from biking, indoor bike lockers and you should also shade your sidewalks with street trees for non-residential users. That’s one aspect of it, but then there’s the design of the streets themselves, the cross-section of the streets. And I make a case, a bit of a legal case, in the book for zoning codes being one place where people who care about street design and the cross-section of the street — how wide lanes are, whether there’s bike lanes, whether there’s street trees where the street furniture goes — that people who are interested in that should look to zoning as a potential tool to get that done. And we also use that in Hartford — Chapter 9 of the zoning code of the city of Hartford talks only about street design and streetscapes. And, in fact, it was used to shape a new development that happened in the city that created new streets. Those streets were built to the standards set out in the zoning code. And I think more cities should consider that as a potential power of zoning.
Jeff Wood: It’s so interesting because streets, like I said, there’s so much space and you can control some of the things that happen with them. And so I think that’s just a fascinating piece of the story of the potential for what you can do with zoning. Streets are also somewhere where a lot of things happen, like rainwater, electricity, internet, transportation. There’s a lot of stuff going on right now with shipping and e-commerce. It’s happening on the street.
And so thinking about the inside of buildings, the frontages of buildings, but also, how people access the buildings as well. And so I think that’s an interesting kind of connection between all this too — is because streets, there’s so much that goes on with them, but then there’s so much that takes you from the public realm that is the street to the building itself, and then intermingling those, or at least making it so that there’s some legibility between what should happen between those two spaces is a really interesting kind of thought as well about, what should be regulated and how.
Sara Bronin: That’s, I think, something that a form based code might help to address. So thinking about the interaction between buildings and streets —whether there is a rhythm of porches on a particular street or rhythm of stoops, whether the front door is visible from the street and on the front facade, as opposed to maybe tuck somewhere in the back or buried. Those are the kinds of things that a form based code in zoning has been used to shape.
Jeff Wood: What do you think of e-commerce?
Sara Bronin: E-commerce I see in my own neighborhood, delivery folks on motorcycles, doing their job of delivery, of big Amazon trucks. And otherwise, coming into the neighborhood and tearing down these rather narrow streets. And I can’t help but think that e-commerce has created another mechanism by which motorized vehicles have just — the volume has increased. I’m not saying that I don’t order anything online. I certainly do, but I do try to patronize local shops and I have the luxury of being able to do that, because I’m in a neighborhood that has zoned for retail stores and service and corner stores and legacy stores in a fairly historic place.
But I think e-commerce has given rise to an increase in the number of cars that are zipping around. And in general, my basic thinking on cars is that we need to get out of our complete dependence on them. Maybe I should never order anything again from an online site, but I do think it has pretty significant impacts on our experience of our cities.
Now, you look at a place like Paris, where the mayor just banned most vehicular traffic in the city core. And you think, wow, could that happen here? Could that ever happen here? What has happened in Paris is that they’ve made the city so walkable. So livable. They’ve even cleaned the Seine and maybe to some extent but much cleaner than it was before.
And I think that kind of directed approach at the local level is sadly missing in our cities. It would be wonderful if we could get to that point where we just had a leader who said, we’re going to make a city for people. We’re going to make streets for people. For people, we’re going to green our streets like Burlington did or is doing right now a city that I highlighted in the book.
And, that’s really my bias. That’s embedded probably in a lot of the critiques I have of American cities today that are sprinkled throughout Key to the City.
