I had an interesting thought recently, while I was idly staring at my phone: zoning is like the internet and smartphones. Once it’s ubiquitous, it becomes very difficult to imagine how we did anything before or without it.

We know we did, and we can plainly see it all around us—our parents, people who don’t use smartphones, places built long before zoning—but the ability to mentally inhabit that reality is somehow limited or foreclosed. It’s kind of like how you can’t see something for the first time again. Simply by having what we have, our perception is limited.

It’s fascinating. I wonder how people ever managed to get rescued in emergencies? How did friends meet up? How did you let someone know you were stuck in traffic or running late? How did you…do anything?

The answer, of course, is that we had habits for all of these things which we have now forgotten. You’d meet at a landmark instead of texting each other both saying you’re here. You left early if you thought traffic might be an issue. I’m sure there are things I’m not aware of that I could list here. Sure, not every eventuality has an answer, but people somehow socialized and got things done just fine.

That feeling of being utterly lost and metaphorically naked when your smartphone is dead or lost is just not how everybody felt before smartphone came along. That frustration of not being able to look something up instantly wasn’t a normal feeling when someone in, say, 1980 said, “Hey, what was that cartoon called that we watched growing up?”

Something similar is true of the built environment and zoning. We frequently go back to the trope of “Do you want a slaughterhouse next door to your house?” But we don’t think all that much about how the places we love—and to a great extent the only places we love—were built before, or without, zoning. I suppose the question doesn’t really even occur to most people. “It just kind of happened.”

Exactly.

What New Urbanism really is, and what zoning reform is largely about, is a conscious attempt to relearn the lost art of town-building and placemaking. I wrote about this for The Lamp, a Catholic variety magazine for which I did a piece on literally and figuratively “losing the recipe”—forgetting knowledge of things no longer widely in use, and often, in ways we didn’t think about, being poorer for it.

I don’t believe this piece ever came out from behind the paywall, so I’m taking the liberty of sharing a long, relevant excerpt:

By the first decades of the 20th century, America’s urban places had fallen deeply out of favor, and many were in a sorry state. But in the 1960s and 1970s, buoyed by the sense that suburban sprawl had begun to despoil the American landscape, Americans began to discover a new appreciation for historic places. In this era, just in the region I live, historic Annapolis in Maryland, Old Town Alexandria across from Washington, D.C., and the small Virginia villages of Clifton and Waterford, were restored after decades of neglect, and today are prized for their historic charm. This process of urban revitalization—quite distinct from, and probably the opposite of, “urban renewal”—took place all across the country.

It took another 10 or 20 years, however, for Americans to awaken to the fact that they no longer quite knew how to actually build places like this. James Howard Kunstler, an early popularizer of what became known as the New Urbanism, wrote about the rediscovery of traditional building methods in his 1996 book Home From Nowhere.

Old buildings were built with the expectation that they would last for a very long time. They “embodied a sense of chronological connectivity,” Kunstler wrote in an Atlantic adaptation of his book, which “lends meaning and dignity to our little lives” and “puts us in touch with the ages and with the eternities.” Even a building as commonplace and commercial as a hotel was built with a deliberation scarcely imaginable today. Wrote Kunstler of the old Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, then a small city of less than 15,000 people:

The layers of intersecting patterns at work in this place were extraordinarily rich. The patterns had a quality of great aliveness, meaning they worked wonderfully as an ensemble, each pattern doing its job while it supported and reinforced the other patterns. The hotel was therefore a place of spectacular charm. It was demolished in 1953.

The first generation of New Urbanists visited pre-World War II towns, neighborhoods, and cities, observing and recording the fine details of curbs, streets, setbacks, and more. So much of the country’s existing fabric was built according to traditional methods and design standards, yet that working body of knowledge, that “information ecosystem,” was more or less extinct by the 1980s, buried under a regulatory avalanche of single-use zoning and car-oriented planning. The ideas of the streetscape, the interplay between private and public spaces, the street as a “public room,” no longer animated planning or architecture. While it had once been possible to build with beauty almost unselfconsciously, relying on that body of knowledge, it is now considered a sort of boutique concern.

New Urbanists essentially had to treat existing American settlements as specimens, and use them to reverse engineer that old understanding of town-building. What are now known as “form-based codes” were attempts to codify this previously widely known body of town-building and place-making knowledge.

For a country that is so wedded to the idea of the individual, the inventor, the entrepreneur, it is strange that we trust the development of our places to codes that only attorneys can understand, and to relatively opaque, licensed professions like urban planning and traffic engineering. There is, of course, a role for such professionals. But there is a much larger role for ordinary people. It is just so odd to me that we do not trust people to do one of the most natural things imaginable: craft, and participate in, the places in which they live.

If you think that sounds like a pipe dream, or hopelessly idealistic, just go look at your local Main Street. We live surrounded by evidence of things we think are impossible.

Related Reading:

A Bridge Too Far

There’s a Small Hotel

Funerals for Buildings

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