This podcast is supported by VPLA. Victorian Planning Environmental Law Association. Welcome to the Planning Exchange where we interview built environment professionals who are doing interesting work beyond the ordinary. I'm Jess Noonan and I'm joined by my colleague Peter Jewell. Today we're lucky enough to be speaking with Sarah Bronin. Sarah knows zoning as well as any expert in the country. A former Rhodes Scholar, she's a professor of law and urban planning at Cornell University.
She grew up in Houston, famously the country's largest city without zoning, and splits her time between Washington DC and Hartford, Connecticut, whose zoning code she led the efforts to overhaul. Welcome to the show, Sarah. Thank you so much for having me, Jess and Peter, can you give our listeners a background as to how you got to where you are, both education and work history. So I started off my college career, I guess, going to architecture school.
And in the US, it's a five year degree that leads to the professional. Licensing for architecture. So I did the five year Bachelor of Architecture, then I went to England for two years and did a master's degree in history and came back to the States at Yale to do a law degree. So 10 years of straight schooling.
I started after that as a professor of law focused on land use law and actually historic preservation law was my first class that I taught and they prepared the materials for that and eventually wrote a book on that. But I've been focused, both in my professorial work as well as consulting and public service on the very questions that are covered by this book, really how do our laws. Make or not make beautiful, sustainable and equitable cities.
Congratulations on the book, Sarah, which is just about to be released, I think which we're recording now in late November your book key to the city, how zoning shapes our world in that you explore how power structures shape cities. Can you explain why understanding these power dynamics is essential for city planners and city managers? Well, so thinking about how zoning and land use rules get enacted at the local level, it is inherently a political process.
You look at, mayors leading zoning reforms or city councils, negotiating with individual developers or even state legislatures as they, intervene in local zoning, which is their right because the power to zone in the U. S. comes from state governments. I do think understanding how politics and institutions come into play in developing our land use rules is really important. And that's why I start the book with a bit of a history of zoning in the US which really speaks to.
The federal government's role actually and in jump starting zoning as it's practiced today, and then also now the role of states, which about 100 years ago all adopted these state zoning enabling acts and now at the local level, we actually don't know how many local governments have zoning in the U. S. I'm working on that in another project called the National Zoning Atlas, but again, those power dynamics are really important because they help explain why we have the roles that we have.
Now, Sarah, when you started your architecture degree, did you anticipate or foresee, how you would end up working in this field? Working across both architecture planning and law. I did.
In fact, I applied to law school from architecture school and only deferred to go to Oxford, but I knew that even in school, when we were told, go out and design these beautiful projects or this new house in this hypothetical lot or a library or a fire station, we didn't really have any constraints as architecture students, and that just. Fundamentally struck me as Great for innovative design, but maybe not so realistic.
And so I took a special interest in the classes that touched on legal topics. And one of those was a professional practice class that touched on topics like contracts that you might make as an architect with a contractor or a consultant and also touched a bit on zoning. So I think for me, understanding land use laws. And building codes and some of the other things that I've studied in my career is really an outgrowth of architecture school.
I knew very well, even then that I needed to understand these rules to understand how cities actually get built. Sarah, the title of the book is Key to the City, How Zoning Shapes Our World. What brought you to the concept of a key of, you know, the key? Well, I think zoning affects everything that happens in, I guess I would even say almost the entire country, the populated areas of the country. We do see places. Primarily rural areas, although it's just pointed out the top Houston.
Also, a large city that does not have zoning, but most large cities, suburbs, you know, relatively reasonably populated counties. They have this power to zone. And I think it's both at the local level and at an aggregate scale with all of these local decisions kind of adding up. You see how important zoning is to the economy to society to our environment. To transportation patterns and housing, you know, and a lot of the things that have those things I focus on in the book.
Sarah, you're obviously talking to two planners here. And we've both really only got urban planning experience. I don't think you'd have anything else specifically, Pete, that you've studied. Um, but what struck me is really interesting. Reading through the book was that comment that you made about. And the, the reference in the book about Houston, not having any zoning that blows my mind. And I don't know too much about planning in the States and I haven't actually been there.
So we'd love to understand a little bit more from you about how that actually works. And is that a good thing or a bad thing? In the book, I argue that the absence of zoning in Houston is problematic because the city a lot more on private rules. They call them covenants in the US. I'm not sure. Um, you know, if that, that translates over, but we have the same thing. So we, we call them restrictive covenants here. Yeah. So, so great.
And so you, so these are recorded on individual deeds and constrain future owners. So in lots of places, you might not have covenants because you have zoning or you have other rules that are in place in Houston, where land is regulated from a use perspective. It's regulated through covenants, many of which are decades and decades old sometimes over 100 years old, and a lot of which really constrain the way the city grows and develops. So that's an over reliance on private rules on the one hand.
On the other hand, you see a city where, people, especially, residents with housing, located in floodplain areas or in areas that are prone to sea level rise. A lot of these areas are hit repeatedly by weather events. And if we had zoning, we might not be putting housing there in the first place. And then overall from the city's growth, and sort of managing, managing growth, making sure that the city is, is beautiful, which is something that zoning can achieve.
You just don't see that in Houston. And you don't see a city that really has much orderly development. So one of my favorite. Land uses that I used to site, although the land uses switched over in recent years, but it was an adult use shop that was very prominently located in the parking lot of a very fancy shopping mall. You had in my house where I, my apartment, where I grew up right across the street, there was a gas station, a self storage facility, a strip mall, and a nightclub.
And so as land use planners, you know that that doesn't necessarily make a ton of sense in a neighborhood where there's a lot of families with young kids. So I guess Houston, to me, makes the case for zoning and the absence of it has different dimensions across a lot of different areas, but, is something that I hope readers. Uh, can understand in the book and just for context, Houston is a sprawling city, too.
So it has annexed land outside of city limits, um, many different across decades, actually. And the city is about 500 square miles. That is enormous. Um, so I think, again, that kind of explains what's going on in Houston and the dynamics there. And Sarah, just, just in terms of the covenants, because as we mentioned before, that, that does translate into Australian property law as well.
Presumably, and this is the case in Australia, trying to remove or amend or change a restrictive covenant on someone's title is a very Convoluted and extensive process. I would imagine that it's fairly similar with the covenants that you're referring to, which therefore makes it really difficult to, say any evolution of, of those laws.
I think a great example of that is one I use in the book about my uncle's property that he purchased, and it had a covenant on there that said that you could not use this property for anything other than residential uses. And it was in fact still a historic home shaped like a home, but what had happened over time is that particular street had become a commercial street.
So in violation of the restrictive covenant, all of these businesses were operating up and down the street in these historic houses as businesses. Now he wanted to expand his veterinary clinic, which was in another historic house on the other side of the street into the property that he purchased.
And a neighbor essentially lodged a complaint with the city, which sent him down this deep rabbit hole of legal issues and city lawsuits and and more costing him tens of thousands of dollars, whereas zoning code, which could change in response to change conditions much easier than a restrictive covenant, you know, would have just had him going to the office filing for 100 permit and calling it a day. So the restrictive covenant, the unchangeability of those, you're right.
It's very difficult to change. The usually involves a court process. And in my uncle's case, the inflexibility of the restrictive covenant really speaks to, the need for more rational rules that affect land. And Sarah, just out of interest is that process, you know, is it months? Is it years long to change a covenant?
It's not only lengthy, and I would say probably more in the span of years than months, just given the way the court system works, so it's, it's lengthy and expensive, but there's not necessarily a guarantee of success. In most states, the property law rules require you to show often some kind of hardship, some kind of significantly changed conditions, which I think my uncle could have shown in that case. It might involve, some proof of changes in the land itself.
And so it's not a slam dunk even when you ask to remove a restrictive covenant. Well, Sarah, I'm going to stand up for Houston. I've never been to Texas. I've been to other parts of the States, but I think it's great to have a place like that. So you can compare it to the default, the standard, um, the standard situation with zoning. Do you take any truck with what I'm saying that it's good to have, uh, uh, exceptions so you can test theories and things like that.
Well, I do like the counterfactual. So it is helpful to have a counterfactual given that so much of the country does have zoning. On the other hand, for the people actually living in Houston, the counterfactual, it's not an abstract concept, right? They're, they're sort of affected. On the ground in their daily lives with the maybe just disorderly situation that you have there.
As I point out in the book, Houston does have some controls on land development so it does have minimum parking requirements and minimum lot sizes and other maybe what you might call lot and lot restrictions. But beyond that it is fairly limited so you're right it does provide a great counterfactual for us to use. And in fact, Houston has been studied by lots of different scholars. And Sarah, in your book, you provide a chronological history of land use zoning.
And I learned a lot, how that evolution of the controls came about. Important is this, and you might have to help me out here, use a lead, lead in zoning case named after a city in Ohio. Can you talk a little about the significance of that court decision? I think it was in the 1920s and what that put in train. Okay. And. Please pronounce my terrible pronunciation as well. It is the Village of Euclid versus Ambler Realty.
As you point out, it's a 1926 case, and it was a very significant case because at the time the practice of zoning was fairly new. It was a case that went all the way up to the U. S. Supreme Court, and the question in the case was, It was essentially whether zoning was legal, whether it was something that was consistent with local government's police powers. The Supreme Court said yes, of course it did, because otherwise we wouldn't have zoning as we have it today.
And from there, zoning really took off in communities all across the country. The way that people refer to the old school way that the Euclid zoning ordinance is structured, so a pyramidal zoning scheme, is called Euclidean zoning. So you were close enough, but it has nothing to do with geometry. Everything to do with the fact that this tiny little village, decided to, or was the subject of this zoning suit.
And Sarah, your book outlines why it's important to study the historical origins and motivations behind early zoning. And obviously we've just spoken about the Euclidean case there. Do you agree with that and how is it best for people to go about undertaking that research and why is it important? I do think we should look back at zoning's origin story, and I do touch on that in the book. And I would say, again, probably about 100 years ago is when zoning really started to take off.
You had the Euclid case, you had the federal government, the U. S. Department of Commerce playing a role in actually drafting a state model Zoning Enabling Act, which all the states eventually adopted. The history, though, I think is, while it's important, and while we should look back, especially at zoning's more racist justifications, I think we also need to do a lot more thinking about what zoning is today and how it can be reshaped for the future.
So the context in some ways again, very important, provides some information about why we went about adopting zoning in the first place, how it spread, what motivated it, but I almost feel like zoning has been so stale and so many communities for so many years. That what we really need to do is take stock of where we are right now and use that as the starting point to, to move forward.
I tend to feel that, you know, thinking too much about the origins kind of chains us to that past and those dialogues rather than unleashing the opportunity that zoning provides, which is what I hope my book tries to tries to do. Sarah, on that point, a lot of times, modern thinking or contemporary thinking is a bit conceited because It assumes that people who made decisions previously in other times weren't as smart as us.
Um, and by studying those origins and also the progression of zoning and sort of what went wrong. Don't we gain some insights to, I know the circumstances were different then, but. They were very smart people who brought these controls in and who managed them, and sometimes it went wrong. Do you think there's some value in that sort of appreciation? That, um, learning from what they did wrong or what we now know they did wrong? Sorry. It's a clumsy question.
Well, I think you're getting at something important, though, which is if we do look back and we think about those motivations and the types of provisions they put in place, what can we learn about how zoning is endured today and how it should change? And I think one of the key things that we can learn when we look back is that there were so many instances of.
People just copycatting one code from one place to the next, the state enabling laws being translated almost word for word from one state to the next, taken from that U. S. Department of Commerce guide, and then just not changed or barely changed or changed wholesale in a way that was deeply problematic and that we would know today based on planning research and understandings about how humans interact with their environment that we would never decide to build today.
If we knew back then when the wave of zoning that swept Zoning reforms that swept cities in the 1950s would lead to a car oriented culture that made us all chain to our cars in the US, many of us anyway, for the rest of our lives and for generations to come. I think we may not have made those mistakes, but at that time we thought, Oh, the car is such a great idea. So I guess what I would say is that one of the things I do push in the book is to try to make sure.
That we are reinvestigating zoning, that we are reinterrogating the zoning laws and the books, and not just sitting there copying from one code to the next, making the same unfounded assumptions in some cases, and really trying to be innovative.
So that's where I would land on that question, I feel like a lot of cities across the world grapple with this idea about, whether zoning should be You know, state and place specific, or whether or not there's value in having national approaches to zoning. Do you have a view on this?
I think in part because there's so much convergence in so many codes, in many ways we do have national consensus on how zoning should go now and I think that consensus Is based on some assumptions and based on some ideas, at least that that might have been relevant in the past, but are for many Americans no longer relevant, namely the assumption that we all want to live and single family only residential areas where we have to drive everywhere that that is
what American zoning primarily requires. Well, so that's very similar to what we've got here in Australia. So, that car based, suburban, model is very much entrenched here as well. So very similar parallels. I mean, we're starting to see a lot of difference in that system, um, evolving through particularly in our city areas, but I think certainly for our suburbs and our regional areas, that would certainly still be the case. You also cite examples of Hartford in your book.
Can you tell our listeners a little bit about Hartford and your relationship with the town? And we note that you dedicated the book to the people of Hartford, so there must be something there. Oh, yes. I spent seven years as chair of the city's, planning and zoning commission. For your listeners, around the world, Hartford is the capital city of Connecticut, which is a state in New England, one of the oldest states in the country.
Hartford was founded in 1635, long before the establishment of the U. S. as a country. And for that reason, it's a historical city, it's a compact city, it is filled with amazing neighborhoods. But like many cities in the U. S., it also Has suffered from the ebbs and flows of economic development, and in particular, Hartford used to be an industrial capital with lots of large factories everywhere.
And those factories have gone into disuse and, you know, as a result, changes in interest in people living in central cities as well. The city of Hartford has seen a lot of disinvestment. And has had a lot of buildings and neighborhoods that have seen population loss and consequently, the underutilization of buildings.
So I guess I would say Hartford is part of a group of post industrial cities that has struggled as manufacturing in the U. S. has waned a bit, and for that reason, it makes it a very interesting place to have worked on zoning, which in my view has the potential to help people. revive communities like Hartford, and which I tried to work towards in my role as chair of the Planning and Zoning Commission. Sarah, how's it going now? From when you started, is there a renaissance in Hartford?
Are things turning the right way? I hope so. I am no longer chair of the Planning and Zoning Commission. I stepped down in 2021. But since there's certainly been new development. There's been development that follows the rules we set out in the zoning code, including as of right housing related development.
And no minimum parking requirements and a form based code that helps us to get rid of some of the strip malls and car washes and car oriented development generally that we saw across the city. And I hope that will continue as development proposals happen and as things get built and rehabilitated and as uses and these older factories change that all of that continues to contribute to Hartford's rise.
And I'm very optimistic about Hartford and cities like it I think a creative approach to zoning, as I cover in the book across several similar cities including Baltimore, Maryland, that those ideas can help to revive this particular kind of city post industrial city. It's great. Jess that Sarah's got that. Hands on experience, lived experience of managing, you know, overseeing zoning. And I'm sure Sarah that helped tremendously with the book.
Absolutely. You can see Hartford and the stories of Hartford residents and business owners in several of the chapters in the book. And in fact, I would consider Hartford to be. An anchor across the book and across the different chapters and I could have maybe written an entire book just about the Hartford zoning code and the changes there, but my publisher said, maybe people would be interested in hearing about other cities too. You've sold the place very well.
I'm keen to visit next time I go to the States, Sarah. And you can keep that for your next book, Sarah. And throughout Key to the City are examples of zoning done well. And badly, examples that given as it relates to downtown music and all creators, for example, Nashville and Austin, why did you go, you know, why did you take this approach of using examples like that and what were those examples, what did they give us?
Well, I think having different examples and stories of cities and neighborhoods in the book helps to ground. What could have been a very dry, technical, theoretically oriented, book. And so I look at the books that I've written before, which include legal treatises and textbooks and very technical articles. And that is never going to capture the attention of people. an audience that doesn't already have a reason to pick up a text like that.
I tried to write this book in a way that would be interesting to a lot of different kinds of people, not just lawyers, not just planners, but people who might be curious about the role of zoning and might want to understand how it does shape our world, I guess, as the subtitle suggests. But, that's why I tried to use the stories of individual neighborhoods and by and large places where I have been.
The only place in the book I think I haven't been, but was just too obvious for me to not include was Las Vegas, Nevada. So maybe some of your listeners have been there. And in that part of the book, I write about aesthetics and signage, very specifically. Now, Sarah, in the book, you say done wrong zoning can take us to past mistakes, acting as an invisible drag on our aspirations, but done right. Zoning can be a revolutionary vehicle for transforming place.
Now, how do we ensure, I guess, that the way that we're currently doing zoning doesn't lead to poor outcomes in our future? Is it about education? Is it about, or how do we educate, I guess, our state representatives, our local representatives and even the plan is. working in the system? How do we ensure that we don't make the same mistakes of the past?
Well, nothing ensures that we won't make mistakes, but I think we have enough information to know how some standard zoning provisions, including large minimum lot sizes and minimum parking requirements, have hurt The development of our communities. So I kind of feel like we have enough information to make decisions about how to unravel or how to modify certain common provisions and zoning, and we should move forward on those changes.
At the local level or at the state level, whichever one seems to be most politically feasible. We also have, I think, the benefit of a growing body of research on zoning and its impacts a growing understanding of within the planning act within planning academia within architecture. Within historic preservation that zoning does play a really important role.
So I do think that really interrogating zoning, using the data and the research that's already been published, that we can really move forward, even if some mistakes might be made, because most times. The status quo is going to be worse than some of the things again that we know from experience from research from data have a chance of being successful. Sarah, the zoning system has its critics and, and fair enough, it also has its supporters.
What successes do you think, how do you rate it over the last 100 years? It's a very tough question, but do you give it, like a six out of 10? Do you give it a four out of 10? Oh, gosh. Sorry, Sarah. It's a, it's a. Can I read it? I don't even know if I can read it. I mean, in many cases, it's a. Zero or one out of 10, but in other cases, in terms of segregating, you mentioned the Houston example of sort of a real mix of land uses.
So it has achieved, some good, it's achieved a number of good things by segregating and presumably improved residential amenity standards in some case by segregating the uses that aren't great. Um, where am I going with this question, Jess? Help me out. But, so, Sarah, it's very unfair, so you can't rate it. Uh, in some cases good, some cases bad.
I think that sums it up and I would say an unfortunate number of bad cases and maybe even a majority of land that could be more flexible in the way that it's owned and that a majority of land that is zoned for single family only single family residential large lot zoning.
All of those places represent opportunities in my view to move in a different direction to understand community needs and again to really question, is the zoning code working the way it was intended to work and what can we do better. And in terms of the audience for this book, Sarah, who are you targeting specifically? I want anybody who's curious about the way that their neighborhood or their city has developed to be interested enough in the idea of zoning that they pick up this book.
So as I said before, you know, it's not a book that I, that I just wanted lawyers to read or just wanted planners to read. It's a book that I feel like. Everybody should have an interest in and so part of, the part of why I'm so glad to be on your show is that it hopefully reaches a few more people and entices them to pick up the book and explore this more expansive idea about what zoning is and what zoning can do.
But I want to maybe even so maybe another obvious audience, people who are involved in local government planning commissioners. neighborhood activists and leaders, the environmental movement, transportation advocates, of course, housing advocates.
We've talked a lot about zoning in the U. S. as it relates to housing, but I do want to bring in some of these other groups, and that's why I include a chapter on environmental issues, a chapter on transportation, because I think people don't think enough about the cumulative impacts of zoning on these groups. Sarah, I found your book very enjoyable. And the examples you cite really bring the issues to the forefront.
The zoning system is just there, you write to improve the analysis and understanding of it , is there, have you come across viable alternatives? or is it just a case of making it work better? A number of questions in that, sorry. I think it's the latter.
I think it's, let's take what we have and try to make it work better because humans have always tried to order their communities through some kind of land use and building regulations so we kind of always come back to something like zoning, when we organize our cities going back to Roman planning and the other city states all throughout history, we've seen again that that sort of ordering, and I don't think you can escape. That, that at some point humans want that.
And even, you know, Houston aside and very rural areas in the U. S. aside, many of which don't have zoning, you do, again, you do see that impulse as soon as you start getting any critical massive density. So I do think it's a matter of making it work better rather than just tossing zoning out, uh, and trying to find something different. Eventually we'd come back to zoning itself. Sarah, I think this was your first book, it?
I've had a few, as I mentioned, legal treatises and textbooks, but this was the first one that is aimed towards a non legal audience. Yeah, sure. So what did you, what was different about those processes and what did you learn about this process and what surprised you about creating the book? It really pushed me out of my comfort zone in terms of being a legal scholar and being a technical expert. So one of the things that I learned was. That I have.
a lot to learn when it comes to creating a book that's story based and people based. And I guess I've, written about places before, but this is really getting into deep, deep history and explanation of how places came to be and every city that I, include in the book, I did a deep dive on how it developed and how a particular neighborhood within it developed and the dynamics there.
And so I think that all of that research is part of creating a book where the cities, and again, some of the people that I mentioned do come to life and I hope they do anyway. And I think that's, that's one of the, been one of the great things they've learned is really, I had to retrain myself as to how to write and hopefully did a good enough job that some people can pick it up and might. Not put it down after just the first few pages.
And I also shared a lot about my own personal story in the book, how I grew up, how I moved, what my parents thought about their housing decisions, where I live now. So opening up about my own personal life was a bit daunting, but again, I feel like that was, that's really all of those places where I lived have shaped how I think about the world, how I think about. Land use regulation, how I think about zoning.
Sarah, some of the commentary in the book about family, you know, they move to like a sort of area where. It was an enterprise sort of area. People came there to get established and I think they started a business, but then things, the, the area deteriorated and they decided that, no, it's time to leave. I mean, I found those sort of things and having the zoning and the planning land use issues built around those things. I found that very captivating. Well, thank you.
And I think that they were zoning or the lack of zoning in the case of the Houston chapter of the book is It was part of that story, but it wasn't the full story.
And so what I was trying to do too, was to say that, that zoning or the, in that case, again, the lack of zoning may have played a role, but there were all of these other dynamics going on and they contributed to the ways that my family has decided to move from one place to the other and the decisions they made about where to invest their income for housing, a key decision that many American households make, and just wanted to describe how they did that and
what sort of spatial consequences that had for my family and for me personally. Sarah, zoning codes seek to create certainty and consistency, to be fair, and they're also perhaps written with the worst case scenarios in mind a lot of the times. Can you talk about how government risk adverse approaches can conflict with the dynamic nature of enterprise? You know, how are these things reconciled? That's an interesting question because I think the premise of it, that zoning codes.
are there to help create consistency is not, is not always the case. And I mean that not for things like single family neighborhoods, which are very consistent, but for other areas like mixed use areas, areas where you might have multifamily housing. I think those types of areas that type of zoning tends to be much more gray, much more, much more often subject to public hearings and the public process, and actually putting the risk on property owners who are seeking to develop. Their properties.
So from a government perspective, in a way, many zoning codes shift the risk from government to property owners and they sort of say, Well, you know, here is it is possible you could get permitted for this, but you got to run through these five different gauntlets before you actually make that happen. I think zoning codes I mean just switching gears a bit zoning codes do have a role to play in helping to manage climate risk.
And to mitigate the impact of human settlement on the environment, particularly through the transportation sector and reducing the amount of trips we make in cars relative to other types of transportation. So I do think zoning does have a role to play in that, but I wouldn't say that it's been very expert in doing that at the scale that we need. So Sarah, incorporating flexibility is one thing, but when does the exception become the rule?
Is it the best resourced and connected that achieve the better outcomes? For me, it's maybe flexibility within guardrails. So you could think of a mixed use district as being a complete free for all, any use is allowed. Or you could think of it as a mixed use district that is intended to promote some combination of tourism, retail, and service uses. And then you can define your district that way, allowing a broad range of uses within the district. But again, subjecting them to certain rules.
Um, I guess for me that the flexibility question, because zoning codes can be so restrictive and prescriptive. Pushing for flexibility was really an important guiding principle in the book, particularly flexibility with regard to the uses that are allowed in particular districts, and maybe breaking up some of that monotony that we see in far too many single purpose neighborhoods.
So I remember when I was a young planner, decades ago, the council that the local government that I work for they were. There was a big consternation because at the time, and you won't believe this Jess, but video shops were appearing everywhere, you know, the, um, uh, when you would go and, uh, hire a video, um, and there was worry then that, oh, we better try and regulate where does this, how does this land use, Fit in.
Do you think, um, sometimes Sarah, that we need to be a bit more relaxed about, you know, the dynamic changes in the market and the zoning system or to just, have a lot more, flex in it. Yeah, I think so. And it's a, that's an interesting story. I, the, the examples that I include in the book, well, I mean, let's just use the area of creative, creative uses.
I talk a bit about Chicago, of course, another huge American city with lots of different neighborhoods and the flexibility that was shown on the South side to allow for theater, a bar, sort of a mix of. Architect movie, movie theater and architectural use different uses of buildings in a neighborhood that was formerly primarily residential, the conversion of a bank building to more of a culture hub.
And I think saying my argument in the book is that that's, that's a really great way to to allow a community to change. I think the other example that comes up quite regularly, in the context that probably Pete and I work in is this idea about regulating, the land use of fast food in particular, you know, we're in a society now where, that's not seen as a land use or a desirable land use. I should say that, that people want on every street corner yet.
In some of our newer suburbs in Australia, we're seeing a proliferation of those sorts of uses. Has that been something that's come up in the work or the research that you've done? In Hartford, we did visual preference surveys of people showing them images of things that were in their communities. So places that actually existed in their neighborhoods and asking them to rate.
Whether they like them or not, essentially, and we did this several times and irrespective of the neighborhood, the demographic, we found that the lowest rated places from a visual standpoint from a do I like this standpoint were the fast food restaurants that in the gas stations and similar car oriented uses. What they bring to communities is a, of course, a car oriented approach.
They have fairly Robust franchise requirements that say that, well, you have to have a curb cut that's 30 feet wide. You have to have two of them. You have to be on a corner lot. There has to be a huge amount of parking. And then of course with the drive-throughs, the idling of the cars that comes along with that, because people in Hartford so strongly expressed a preference against those kinds of restaurants coming into the community, we essentially zone them out.
And I think in some ways, doing that in tandem with an expansion of our urban agriculture provisions, actually not an expansion we've never had them we wrote them for the first time, allowing expressly for things like community gardens and farmers markets. Urban farms, as well as, of course, a variety of individual, gardening, farming, beekeeping, henkeeping, and things like that. I hope that over time that will help improve the overall health of Hartford.
Zoning has a really big role to play in the food supply. I cover that in an entire chapter in the book. And not only when it comes to fast food and urban agriculture, but also in rural areas. Where we have these huge commercial agricultural feeding operations that have huge negative impacts on the environment. It was very interesting, the urban agriculture, section in your book, Sarah, I mean, I've got bees, so I appreciate anything that makes home agriculture better.
Um, that's a very interesting observation about, you polled the residents of Hartford. There is a program in the UK. Sarah, it's called scenic or not. And what, uh, that's run by university and what they do is they post images and there's thousands and thousands of people who respond to those image and write them just as your residents did. And what they're doing is feeding that into AI so they can build up this. Model code of what works and what doesn't work. It's called scenic or not.
Um, very interesting. Just touching on Sarah, the urban farming aspects, you've mentioned that in your last answer. Are you seeing benefits from that change of people, taking advantage of those opportunities? Well, the benefits include the sort of self determination and the ability to grow your own food, to have direct access to that. Especially in places like Hartford, which are considered.
to be a food desert, a place where fresh food is not available that can help provide some alternatives to the existing fast food or convenience store type options that too many neighborhoods in Hartford tend to rely on. So I think for many communities, and I use Boston in the book, and I touch a little bit on Hartford's urban agriculture provisions.
Those types of changes to rules have been a really important way for communities to just give residents more options in, in how they can access healthy food. And Sarah, in the acknowledgements you write, this book is about the importance of understanding our power to improve the places we live, the places that can, that should sustain and fulfill us. Uh, lovely words. Have you a message for our listeners?
I think my main message in the book and, and in my work more generally is that you can make change. You can be the change with the right people. With a bit of knowledge about how zoning codes work with an understanding of the terms that are used and some of the consequences of some of the more common zoning provisions and armed with some examples about how zoning has worked in the field.
I hope that readers do go out and interrogate the codes in their own communities and see whether there are ways to make them better. Sarah book number two. Oh, if I, if I work on a second book, it will probably be about historic preservation, historic places, and the values that preservationists must weigh in the face of a housing affordability challenge of climate risk. And so many more issues that I think.
uh, challenge the maybe aesthetics oriented approach of much of historic preservation practice. Wow. Look forward to that one, Sarah. If it's half as good as the key to the city, it's going to be terrific. We've moved now to Sarah as the end of the podcast and we call it podcast extra or culture corner. Something you've read, seen, watched, listened to, experienced lately that might be of interest to our listeners.
And it doesn't have to be on topic and it can be more than, it can be more than one recommendation. Well, I'm going to go from the very local to the international and stick with historic preservation.
So just a couple months ago, the Library of Congress put out a report about international approaches to policies at the intersection of historic preservation and climate change, and I actually have a different hat for now, which is a role leading the Federal Historic Preservation Agency, and I asked for this report, and I was greatly and pleasantly surprised by its depth and its scope.
It covers a number of countries, and I think presents some hope to the U. S. and to maybe other people living in other countries about how we might go about protecting our historic resources from climate risks. And how we might incorporate indigenous knowledge into our decisions and how we can use particularly buildings to mitigate the impacts of climate change on our world.
So I encourage it's a very dry but I know your readers are place oriented and policy oriented so for those listeners out there rather that I recommend this Library of Congress report. So check it out and. That's my, that's my, that's what I've just got finished reading and I was very happy. We'll put a link on our episode notes for that, Sarah. Sure. Jess, what have you got a podcast extra extras? Mine is actually the Martha Stewart documentary.
I don't know if either of you have seen that, but, it gives a really interesting take on Martha Stewart's life and, you know, her being allegedly the first female billionaire. And it was a really interesting documentary. I actually quite enjoyed it. An absolute firecracker of a woman. How about you, Pete? Oh, I've got a couple, Jess. I've recently been to Japan, Sarah, for the ninth time. And when I was there, I went to the birthplace of an author I very much like, Osamu Daizo.
D A Z A I. I think it's really, it's a real special privilege to go to the birthplace and the region where an author grew up because it helps you a little bit, understand A bit more about the author and some of the, some of these topics. So he's a terrific author. I'm also reading the bookshop woman by Nanako Anada at the moment. That's a bit of a cult classic. Yes. I think it's one of probably typically what you would prefer than me. I like nonfiction, but.
Those two Japanese, authors are terrific and one final recommendation, Jess, Sarah, I've rediscovered the pleasure of omelettes in the morning. So I would urge all our listeners to start eating omelettes, make the effort. They are fantastic. A bit of, uh, goat's cheese and mushroom or tomato and cheese are my recommendations. Sarah, any thoughts on omelettes? Five stars. Jess, what's your favorite type of omelet? Definitely bacon and cheese. Oh, Jess. All right.
Sarah, you've been a terrific guest. I can't recommend your book highly enough. Key to the city. It makes a very, well, could be a staid topic. Could be a, it could be like a dour topic, zoning. You bring it to life. I really appreciate, love the examples. The book sings along. You can dive in and out of it. It's not some sort of academic trone that is hard that I remember from being when I was at uni. So congratulations on a wonderful book. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.
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