Key to the City
How Zoning Shapes Our World
by Sara C. Bronin (W. W. Norton and Company)
The passage about improving a street by reintroducing cars was surprising, while the author suggesting a roll back of First Amendment jurisprudence was alarming.
Key to the City is a discussion of zoning in the united states and how it affects daily life. The book uses a case study approach of telling the stories of different cities and towns in the U.S. and how choices about zoning have changed those cities, earlier on for the worse, but now for the better, mostly.
The book has a good approach to the problems created by zoning, specifically treating the topic as bigger than zoning. There is the more typical discussion of car infrastructure, but the book also looks at food, industry, nightlife, and building codes or land use more generally. The author is skilled at breaking down the minutia and explaining it for a general audience. The discussions are broad in scope throughout the United States, and address rural areas, even if Hartford, CT is the song’s refrain of where the author was on the planning committee.
It is also NIMBY-lite. Acknowledging the problems that arose out of zoning policy arising from the Supreme Court decision in Euclid, including the bigoted portions of the decision itself, the author is interested in reform, not revolution. Some of it seems reasonable, making moderate improvements where the perfect is not the enemy of the good. Some of it seems wackadoodle, drawn from a technocratic satire: the 15 minute city They warned you about. This sometimes reaches the point where the book contradicts itself, where the spirit of the law trumping the letter leads to takes that I can square, but with effort.
There are a lot of personal asides that are vaguely objectionable. The afterward thanks the editor for making the book less wonkish, but I think that they ought to have zagged, using the author’s adroit technical writing to educate rather than feeling the need to humanize. It is not offensive (contra another reviewer on Swift; my specific complaints are more blog grade), but it is unpersuasive. It does nothing for the author’s thesis. At worst, it is repeating the old mistakes in a new way. But it is this quality that makes the book worth recommending.
Standard urbanist discourse falls into two camps, Libertarian and Progressive. The book comes from more of a centrist position with a small c-conservative streak: civil rights are good; now please go mow your lawn. This is a sort of identity that tends to get flack from both Right and Left (mostly Left). It is core, or adjacent to, opposition to urbanist policies. So, if the worst possible case is that this is old wine in new bottles, the best possible one is that this is a sort of manifesto for a non-traditional set of urbanists, expressing its own set of concerns. That is forward motion, and what productive political argument looks like. It is helpful.
Thus, this is one of those “if you read one book on the topic” books. It is not comprehensive, but if you are the sort of person who is otherwise disinterested in the concept of regulation creating policy, it may help you see what us wonks are wonking over.
My thanks to the author, Sara C. Bronin, for writing the book, and to the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 