Skip to content

Audio Version

See more about

More info

Third Condition Expo developed by MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Department of Architecture, and the Samuel Tak Lee MIT Real Estate Entrepreneurship Lab.
[1] Bosselman, Fred P. “The Influence of Ecological Science on American Law: An Introduction.” Chicago-Kent Law Review 69 (January 1, 1994): 847.

[2] Christopher Serkin and Gregg P. Macey, Post-Zoning: Alternative Forms of Public Land Use Controls, SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, August 6, 2013).

Sonia A. Hirt, Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); Michael Allan Wolf, The Zoning of America: Euclid v. Ambler (Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas, 2008); Nicole Stelle Garnett, Ordering the City (Yale University Press, 2009); Eran Ben-Joseph and Terry S. Szold, eds., Regulating Place: Standards and the Shaping of Urban America, 1 edition (New York: Routledge, 2005).290256.

[3] Serkin and Macey, Symposium.

[4] Rutherford H. Platt, “Land Use Control: Interface of Law and Geography. Resource Paper No. 75-1.,” January 1976; Sidney M. Willhelm, Urban Zoning and Land-Use Theory (Free Press of Glencoe, 1962); Ben-Joseph and Szold, Regulating Place.

[5] Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. 272 U.S. 365 (1926).

Coding the Third Condition

State simplifications can be considered part of an ongoing “project of legibility”, a project that is never fully realized… The radically simplified city plan, provided it is viewed from above, is practical and efficient… The logic behind the spatial segregation and zoning is at once aesthetic, scientific, and practical… it led to visual regularity – even regimentation… it reduced the number of unknowns, for which the planner had to find a solution… too many unknowns in urban planning rendered any solution problematic, or else requiring heroic assumptions… urban planning, is a short step from parsimonious assumptions to the practice of shaping the environment, so that it satisfies the simplifications required by the formula… Compared to uniformity, diversity is always more difficult to design, build, and control.  Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed – James C. Scott.
Zoning was the heaven-sent nostrum for sick cities, the wonder drug of planners, the balm sought by lending institutions and householders alike. City after city worked itself into a state of acute apprehension until it could adopt zoning ordinance. Mel G. Scott, 1969 American City Planning Since 1890.
With a T-square and a triangle, finally the municipal engineer could, without the slightest training as either an architect or a sociologist, ‘plan’ a metropolis, with its standard lots, its standard blocks, its standard street widths, in short with it standardized, comparable, and replaceable parts… Lewis Mumford, 1961 The City in History.

Over the last three centuries, a set of instrumental and reductive tools emerged in pursuit of simplification, legibility, and control over territory. From the early surveyors’ metes and bounds system to the Jeffersonian grid, complex systems of subdivision, land use controls, building codes, special districts, and Euclidian zoning have evolved into the DNA of North American urbanism. The institutions of land use regulation arrived in North America from Germany in the first decade of the twentieth century. On a continent abounding in open land, grounded in an agrarian economy, and characterized by persistent fears of density, racial and ethnic intermingling, and a strong foundation in private property rights, land use controls were enthusiastically adopted. A clear product of the influence of ecological paradigms on American law and policy, zoning remains the most influential and pervasive regulatory tool ever deployed.[1] It is largely responsible for the shape of twentieth-century land development in North America, and to some degree, planning regimes around the world.[2]

Despite the blame so often cast on it, from social malaise to environmental degradation, to social fragmentation, Euclidean zoning has proven remarkably durable as an institution. Through its successive iterations and elaborations, from incentive to performance to overlay zoning, it has remained steadfast in its original goal: the well-defined separation of the uses of land.[3] Such normative divisions have produced static conditions that overlook local nuances, and are especially unmindful to factors of time and change.[4] Ultimately, these instruments have proven marginal in dealing with the “complex and unwieldy reality” of contemporary urbanism, especially in the face of increased vulnerability created by indeterministic, unknown, and unpredictable environmental forces.[5] It is no coincidence that some of the most dynamic and variegated urban conditions, such as post-industrial sites, historic urban cores, dynamic estuaries, peri-urban fringes, and informal settlements, resist zoning’s reductive categorizations. It is in those conditions where design innovation renders such legislative standards irrelevant and inapt. It is in the relative absence of such recognizable order and hierarchy, on the fringes of the poly-nodal metropolis or on flood-prone coastlines, where conditions become ripe for programmatic flexibility, social and spatial experimentation, and economic innovation.

Full content is available only for registered users. Please login or Register
Third Condition Expo developed by MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Department of Architecture, and the Samuel Tak Lee MIT Real Estate Entrepreneurship Lab.

urbanNext (March 26, 2023) Coding the Third Condition. Retrieved from https://urbannext.net/coding-the-third-condition/.
Coding the Third Condition.” urbanNext – March 26, 2023, https://urbannext.net/coding-the-third-condition/
urbanNext December 24, 2016 Coding the Third Condition., viewed March 26, 2023,<https://urbannext.net/coding-the-third-condition/>
urbanNext – Coding the Third Condition. [Internet]. [Accessed March 26, 2023]. Available from: https://urbannext.net/coding-the-third-condition/
Coding the Third Condition.” urbanNext – Accessed March 26, 2023. https://urbannext.net/coding-the-third-condition/
Coding the Third Condition.” urbanNext [Online]. Available: https://urbannext.net/coding-the-third-condition/. [Accessed: March 26, 2023]

urbanNext | expanding architecture to rethink cities and territories

Newsletter

Sign up to our newsletter

Search
Generic filters
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Search in excerpt
Formats
Audio&visual
Concept
Data
Essay
Forum
Lecture
Podcast
Project
Talk
Survey
Statement
Selfthink
High Density
Middle Density
Low Density
No Density

talk

essay

project

product

survey

data

all formats