https://www.arch.columbia.edu/events/301-past-is-prologue-plannings-critical-approach-to-100-years-of-zoning
2016 marks the centennial of New York City’s 1916 Zoning Ordinance, the first comprehensive zoning law adopted in the United States. Over the last century, zoning has transformed from an instrument designed to mitigate industrial development and perpetuate racial segregation to a tool intended to shift urban travel behavior and development patterns. Today, the aims, role, and impact of zoning as a social practice in New York City -and beyond- remain contested.
The anniversary of the 1916 ordinance presents an opportunity to critically assess the current state of land regulation. Zoning shapes the daily transformation of cities, yet has attracted relatively little critical attention. This gap is especially surprising considering zoning’s considerable impact on a wide range of theoretical and practical dilemmas currently facing cities, including threats from climate change, rising inequality and spatial disparities, declining access to jobs, opportunities, and affordable housing, and unstable economic productivity. And although zoning policies have cast their goals in terms of an increasingly larger range of social issues over time, zoning practice has been largely left to experts engaged in closed-door negotiations.
The two-day conference is organized by the department of Urban Planning at Columbia University and jointly hosted by the Museum of the City of New York, who will be holding an exhibit on the same topic this fall. The conference will gather the top scholars and practitioners in the field to take stock of the field and establish a framework for a revitalized examination of zoning in US and international contexts.
Organized by the PhD students in Urban Planning at Columbia GSAPP & supported by the Dean’s office of GSAPP. Special thanks to the Museum of the City of New York for their collaboration.
source
