Zoned American
Author : Seymour I. Toll
Publisher :
Page : 392 pages
File Size : 21,36 MB
Release : 1969
Category : Law
ISBN :
Zoned in the USA
Author : Sonia A. Hirt
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 13,22 MB
Release : 2015-02-24
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0801454700
Book Description
Why are American cities, suburbs, and towns so distinct? Compared to European cities, those in the United States are characterized by lower densities and greater distances; neat, geometric layouts; an abundance of green space; a greater level of social segregation reflected in space; and—perhaps most noticeably—a greater share of individual, single-family detached housing. In Zoned in the USA, Sonia A. Hirt argues that zoning laws are among the important but understudied reasons for the cross-continental differences.Hirt shows that rather than being imported from Europe, U.S. municipal zoning law was in fact an institution that quickly developed its own, distinctly American profile. A distinct spatial culture of individualism—founded on an ideal of separate, single-family residences apart from the dirt and turmoil of industrial and agricultural production—has driven much of municipal regulation, defined land-use, and, ultimately, shaped American life. Hirt explores municipal zoning from a comparative and international perspective, drawing on archival resources and contemporary land-use laws from England, Germany, France, Australia, Russia, Canada, and Japan to challenge assumptions about American cities and the laws that guide them.
Arbitrary Lines
Author : M. Nolan Gray
Publisher : Island Press
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 35,48 MB
Release : 2022-06-21
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1642832553
Book Description
What if scrapping one flawed policy could bring US cities closer to addressing debilitating housing shortages, stunted growth and innovation, persistent racial and economic segregation, and car-dependent development? It’s time for America to move beyond zoning, argues city planner M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. With lively explanations and stories, Gray shows why zoning abolition is a necessary—if not sufficient—condition for building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. The arbitrary lines of zoning maps across the country have come to dictate where Americans may live and work, forcing cities into a pattern of growth that is segregated and sprawling. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Reform is in the air, with cities and states across the country critically reevaluating zoning. In cities as diverse as Minneapolis, Fayetteville, and Hartford, the key pillars of zoning are under fire, with apartment bans being scrapped, minimum lot sizes dropping, and off-street parking requirements disappearing altogether. Some American cities—including Houston, America’s fourth-largest city—already make land-use planning work without zoning. In Arbitrary Lines, Gray lays the groundwork for this ambitious cause by clearing up common confusions and myths about how American cities regulate growth and examining the major contemporary critiques of zoning. Gray sets out some of the efforts currently underway to reform zoning and charts how land-use regulation might work in the post-zoning American city. Despite mounting interest, no single book has pulled these threads together for a popular audience. In Arbitrary Lines, Gray fills this gap by showing how zoning has failed to address even our most basic concerns about urban growth over the past century, and how we can think about a new way of planning a more affordable, prosperous, equitable, and sustainable American city.
A Better Way to Zone
Author : Donald L. Elliott
Publisher : Island Press
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 39,84 MB
Release : 2012-09-26
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1610910559
Book Description
Nearly all large American cities rely on zoning to regulate land use. According to Donald L. Elliott, however, zoning often discourages the very development that bigger cities need and want. In fact, Elliott thinks that zoning has become so complex that it is often dysfunctional and in desperate need of an overhaul. A Better Way to Zone explains precisely what has gone wrong and how it can be fixed. A Better Way to Zone explores the constitutional and legal framework of zoning, its evolution over the course of the twentieth century, the reasons behind major reform efforts of the past, and the adverse impacts of most current city zoning systems. To unravel what has gone wrong, Elliott identifies several assumptions behind early zoning that no longer hold true, four new land use drivers that have emerged since zoning began, and basic elements of good urban governance that are violated by prevailing forms of zoning. With insight and clarity, Elliott then identifies ten sound principles for change that would avoid these mistakes, produce more livable cities, and make zoning simpler to understand and use. He also proposes five practical steps to get started on the road to zoning reform. While recent discussion of zoning has focused on how cities should look, A Better Way to Zone does not follow that trend. Although New Urbanist tools, form-based zoning, and the SmartCode are making headlines both within and outside the planning profession, Elliott believes that each has limitations as a general approach to big city zoning. While all three trends include innovations that the profession badly needs, they are sometimes misapplied to situations where they do not work well. In contrast, A Better Way to Zone provides a vision of the future of zoning that is not tied to a particular picture of how cities should look, but is instead based on how cities should operate.
The Channeling Zone
Author : Michael Fobes Brown
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 35,92 MB
Release : 1997
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 9780674108837
Book Description
Neither a debunker nor an advocate, Michael Brown examines why so many intelligent Americans have turned to channeling as a source of spiritual guidance and how this links with older and more esoteric native religions.
Red, White, and Blue Paradise
Author : Herbert Knapp
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 32,28 MB
Release : 1984
Category : History
ISBN :
Book Description
Dead End
Author : Benjamin Ross
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 19,50 MB
Release : 2014
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0199360146
Book Description
A witty, readable, and highly original tour through the history of America's suburbs and cities to uncover the human impulses that keep sprawl spreading
Zoned Out
Author : Jonathan Levine
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 234 pages
File Size : 50,43 MB
Release : 2010-09-30
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1136526684
Book Description
Researchers have responded to urban sprawl, congestion, and pollution by assessing alternatives such as smart growth, new urbanism, and transit-oriented development. Underlying this has been the presumption that, for these options to be given serious consideration as part of policy reform, science has to prove that they will reduce auto use and increase transit, walking, and other physical activity. Zoned Out forcefully argues that the debate about transportation and land-use planning in the United States has been distorted by a myth?the myth that urban sprawl is the result of a free market. According to this myth, low-density, auto-dependent development dominates U.S. metropolitan areas because that is what Americans prefer. Jonathan Levine confronts the free market myth by pointing out that land development is already one of the most regulated sectors of the U.S. economy. Noting that local governments use their regulatory powers to lower densities, segregate different types of land uses, and mandate large roadways and parking lots, he argues that the design template for urban sprawl is written into the land-use regulations of thousands of municipalities nationwide. These regulations and the skewed thinking that underlies current debate mean that policy innovation, market forces, and the compact-development alternatives they might produce are often 'zoned out' of metropolitan areas. In debunking the market myth, Levine articulates an important paradigm shift. Where people believe that current land-use development is governed by a free-market, any proposal for policy reform is seen as a market intervention and a limitation on consumer choice, and any proposal carries a high burden of scientific proof that it will be effective. By reorienting the debate, Levine shows that the burden of scientific proof that was the lynchpin of transportation and land-use debates has been misassigned, and that, far from impeding market forces or limiting consumer choice, policy reform that removes regulatory obstacles would enhance both. A groundbreaking work in urban planning, transportation and land-use policy, Zoned Out challenges a policy environment in which scientific uncertainty is used to reinforce the status quo of sprawl and its negative consequences for people and their communities.
Crosshairs on the Kill Zone
Author : Charles W. Sasser
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 392 pages
File Size : 10,21 MB
Release : 2004-07-01
Category : History
ISBN : 1416503625
Book Description
From the jungles of Vietnam to the unforgiving deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq, one breed of soldier has achieved legendary status in the arena of combat—the sniper. From the authors of the classic sniper chronicle One Shot-One Kill comes a new generation of true tales from some of the most expert and deadly marksmen in the world. Meet Adelbert Waldron II, whose 109 confirmed kills in Vietnam made him the most successful sniper in American military history, and Tom "Moose" Ferran, who coined the term "Fetch!", whereupon the infantry would retrieve the sniper's dead quarry. Also included are stories from snipers in Beirut, the Bosnian conflict, and both wars with Iraq—including the feat of Sergeants Joshua Hamblin and Owen Mulder, who took down thirty-two enemy soldiers in a single day outside Baghdad in 2003. The military sniper has evolved into one of the most dangerous and highly-skilled warrior professions. They suffer through weather, terrain, and enemy action, lay unmoving for days on end, and take out their targets with unerring accuracy—proving that the deadliest weapon in any battle, anywhere in the world, is a single well-aimed shot.
Family Values
Author : Melinda Cooper
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 449 pages
File Size : 21,69 MB
Release : 2017-02-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 194213004X
Book Description
Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives. Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socio-economic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged — and at the limit enforced — as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. In a series of case studies ranging from Clinton’s welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic, and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.
