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Seth Zeren's avatar

I'm mostly with you, and especially where use regulations are concerned. There is too much dissecting the number of angels on the head of a pin.

BUT-- Where I am a little cautious, is that without zoning we will get worse urbanism in most places from most developers because they have mostly forgotten the development culture that applied when we built our good cities. For some of us, it would make our good projects easier. But we will need a new culture of city building, and I can sometimes talk myself into believing that we could use form-based codes as a sort of training wheels.

No zoning can make a bad building culture build well, and a good building culture doesn't need zoning

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Blanca's avatar

I agree that land-use micromanagement creates more distortion than order. What we often call “planning” has turned into a defensive architecture of exclusion, and the economic damage is no longer theoretical.

But here’s the real opportunity: moving from control to accountability. Instead of saying where things can or can’t happen, we should be demanding how they impact their surroundings. The future of zoning isn’t in static maps,it’s in dynamic performance standards. Houston scratched the surface. We can go further.

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