City planning is divided into two domains: public and private. This paper addresses the distribution and design of the public domain and the elements thereof including its boundaries, streets, public places (like parks and civic buildings), and public monuments. The private domain comprises everything else: people, buildings, signage, land uses, etc. The public domain is more or less permanent; the private domain is more or less changeable.
The history of city planning in the United States provides an invaluable lesson in this regard. In the early 20th century, city planning was just being organized as a profession. The organizers developed model planning laws that correctly divided cities into their public and private components. But over time the profession has departed substantially from this as it now focuses heavily on a set of documents that, in their origin, were limited only to the regulation of private property (just half of the planning problem). To this we are referring to Zoning: that leviathan released onto the modern planning world which has devoured more good intentions and proper planning principles than all ill-informed architects and planners combined, leaving in its wake unsustainable, unadaptable, unwalkable, placeless sprawl.
Lessons from America’s Enabling Statutes
Cities of the post-industrial 1800s around the world were suffering from similar health crises: people were living next to where they worked, and because they worked in unsanitary, unhealthy, unsafe environments they were literally dying from the proximity. To make matters worse, many lived in overcrowded tenement houses without adequate light, air, or sanitation. At that time, people, for the most part, lived in cities by necessity, not by choice. Many cities were dangerous, filthy, and unpleasant places to call home. As the world urbanized, the crisis worsened.
To address these real concerns and stave off future ones, many cities in America began drafting and adopting their own zoning regulations. The concept of zoning—the regulation of private property including land uses and building volume—was first utilized on a city-wide scale in New York when its Zoning Resolution was passed in 1916. The Resolution sought to separate incompatible uses from one another (like coal-burning factories from houses) and to regulate height and bulk of buildings for the purposes of preserving light and air for the city’s streets and parks.
In an effort to achieve consistency and efficiency, an Advisory Committee on City Planning and Zoning was formed under President Herbert Hoover to create model laws that could be adopted across the country. These laws would do two things: 1) provide a national framework of planning and design principles, and 2) provide a vetted legal basis for utilizing these principles and effectuating physical plans. The committee correctly saw the city planning problem as one divided between public and private property and so created two Enabling Statutes to address each of these domains: the Standard City Planning Enabling Act (SCPEA) to address all public property and the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act (SSZEA) to regulate all private property.
The intention behind these two documents was for the SSZEA to be subservient to the SCPEA, as the SCPEA was viewed as the parent document being broader in scope.
To that end, the definition of "comprehensive plan" is originally defined in the SCPEA in this way:
"It shall be the function and the duty of the commission to make and adopt a master plan [a comprehensive plan]. Such plan…shall show the commission’s recommendations for the development of said territory, including, among other things, the general location, character, and extent of streets, viaducts, subways, bridges, waterways, water fronts, boulevards, parkways, playgrounds, squares, parks, aviation fields, and other public ways, grounds and open spaces, the general location of public buildings and other public property, and the general location and extent of public utilities and terminals, whether publicly or privately owned or operated, for water, light, sanitation, transportation, communication, power, and other purposes; also the removal, relocation, widening, narrowing, vacating, abandonment, change of use or extension of any of the foregoing ways, grounds, open spaces, buildings, property, utilities, or terminals; as well as a zoning plan."[^A Standard City Planning Enabling Act, p. 13.]
While the list is indeed comprehensive, it can be broken down into a few broad categories including "public ways", "public buildings", "public property", "public utilities", and "zoning". Zoning is originally defined in the first sentence on the first page of the Zoning Primer written in 1926 as such:
[Zoning is] "the application of common sense and fairness to the public regulations governing the use of private real estate."
"Private real estate." Going back to the definition of comprehensive plan, the division of the city planning problem is clearly delineated here between public and private. Each of the Enabling Acts has an associated critical map with physical implications: The Zoning Act utilizes a zoning map; the City Planning Act utilizes a master street plan (see discussion of master street plans in the previous chapter).
These Acts, known together as the Enabling Acts, formed an excellent foundation for American planning. Unfortunately, their the plan was not fully followed through and the documents’ powers, once mutual or weighted toward the public domain, has shifted dramatically to focus almost solely on zoning.
How and why did this happen? Seeing zoning as the most pressing issue at the time, the SSZEA was published in 1926 and then only later, in 1928, was the SCPEA released. But in their haste the drafters of these foundational documents put the cart before the horse: as zoning’s promise and influence took over the planner’s mindset and toolbox, it garnered more attention, leaving the critical pieces found in the SCPEA ultimately disregarded. There was little regard as to where or how land uses would connect up, or how the respective urban forms of new towns or cities would be utilized once those land uses changed over time.
In the 1947 decision of Bishop vs. Board of Zoning Appeals of the City, the court went so far as to redefine "comprehensive plan" (thus circumventing the SCPEA all together) as:
"A general plan to control and direct the use and development of property in a municipality… by dividing it into districts according to the present and potential use of the properties."
"Use." Land use. Zoning. According to this definition, one no longer needed to provide a master street plan (that framework, structure, or skeleton of urban form that organizes a town or city for centuries and millennia) within a comprehensive plan; instead, one only needed a zoning map. Today, the zoning map is the foundation of almost all comprehensive plans.
The problem is that land uses are fleeting. They come and go. They are a variable. It is no wonder then why so many comprehensive plans today so quickly go outdated—it is the variable of land uses that forces them to keep up. Great American cities like Philadelphia, New York, Washington, and Chicago did not begin life with a zoning map—they materialized through the rigorous and patient execution of a master street plan. The planners and designers for those cities created a framework of streets that would prove to adapt to a multitude of unforeseen futures, including a multitude of unforeseen land uses (the Commissioners of New York in 1811 could not possibly have foreseen the coming of the skyscraper; General James Oglethorpe, when laying out the town of Savannah in 1732, could not possibly have predicted the sizes of dumpsters and waste-management trucks that work so well within the alleys he ultimately drew).
It is imperative for the success of cities that a master street plan precede a zoning plan. A planning process that puts zoning first and land subdivision second will result in unsustainable, unadaptable, and unwalkable urban forms. It is the critical point of this paper that land subdivision be considered before land use. It is the public framework of streets and blocks that must be designed in meticulous and rigorous detail. Many of those details are addressed in this paper.
Any city-wide, town-wide, or neighborhood-wide plan (by any name, be it comprehensive plan, master plan, or the like) that does not have a land subdivision pattern as its foundation, regardless of scale, location, time, or money, will ultimately fail to live up to the expectations of the designers or the challenges that history will inevitably throw at it. One cannot create a solid foundation for a city based on the variable of land uses; one can only do this using the permanence of the public framework by directly placing and shaping its boundaries, streets, public places, and monuments.
History is clear: land subdivision must take precedent over land use. Then, and only then, will a neighborhood or city be allowed to grow and evolve into something great, unique, sustainable, and adaptable, just as the development of all the great examples of urban form throughout history have done. Cities are not about projects, they are fabric. It is the primary mission of the planner to establish and promote that fabric; the lessons and principles outlined in this paper (which are all based on extensive analyses of urban forms that vary by scale, time, and location) acts as a guide in that regard.