Why is Jakarta booming?  Well, like many Asian economies, Indonesia’s economy is growing – but not as fast as those of India or China.  The real reason is urbanization.  Indonesia is only 46% urbanized, compared to almost 80% for the world’s third most populous country — the United States.  Like many developing countries with one dominant city, a disproportionate amount of rural-to-urban migration finds its way to that city, and the government struggles to keep up.  The story in Jakarta is the same as the story in Delhi or Shanghai – urbanization is happening far faster than municipal governments can plan for it, build for it, or pay for it.

Does Jakarta hold any lessons for U.S. cities?  Yes, probably.  Although traffic always threatens to overwhelm Jakarta’s street network, the city has chosen to set aside valuable lane areas for the public bus system, and those dedicated rights-of-way make the busses a welcome escape from the slow moving auto and motorbike traffic.  During my stay I met several Jakartans who were proud to say they owned cars but quick to add that they did not use them to get to work – they took the much faster busses even though they were more crowded.  On the downside, Jakarta’s street system is pretty bi-polar – very big roads move most of the commuting traffic, but feed directly onto tiny barely-two-lane neighborhood streets only feet from single- and two-story houses from another, slower era.  There does not seem to be much in between the largest and smallest of streets – the intermediate level of collector streets is often missing.  When arterials get overcrowded in the U.S. commuters seek the collectors as secondary routes, but in Jakarta escaping the boulevards puts heavy traffic on the smallest of streets.

The second lesson is the inevitability of mixed use development.  When cities grow rapidly, they tend to both densify and sprawl.  Even if a competent and effective city government wanted to enforce separate residential, commercial, and industrial development areas on the new growth edge, that would be impossible in the older core.  In Jakarta this plays not only in a mix of high-rise residential and commercial towers along the major arterials, but in a fine grained mix of residential, commercial, and light industrial uses in the one- and two-story buildings immediately behind the towers.  As Jakarta struggles to keep up with its urbanization, the primary focus will almost certainly be on providing roads and infrastructure, with a secondary focus on the scale of development.  Attempting to separate uses will probably be only a minor theme – just as it has declined in importance in the U.S.  The “Mixed Use Middle” that I identify in A Better Way to Zone has always been the norm in most large cities outside North America.

Form-based zoning is one of the latest examples of a popular planning idea. And it’s a really good tool in some circumstances. The basic idea is that zoning has gotten too pre-occupied with fine grained differences in land uses and has lost site of the “form” of development. The real issue may not be that the land use is inappropriate, but that the form of the building doesn’t fit in with those around it. Look around any dense urban area – particularly a downtown or a transportation hub – and you can find a very broad range of land uses. Offices, apartments, stores, condominiums, clinics, gas stations; how could any proposed use be inappropriate? This is an area where everything goes on. Clearly, zoning that focuses on acceptable land uses might be missing the point. But building a 15-story residential tower in a townhouse area, or a shoppette with parking in front right in the middle of a block of storefronts that you can enter right from the sidewalk – now that could be a problem. The new “form” could erode the character of the area and destroy the very things that make it desirable — a human scale, or walkability, or back yard privacy. Where an urban area has a definable character and form, form-based zoning may make a lot of sense.

But there are many areas of most cities where it is hard to find that form. Areas where there is a true mix of forms and styles. Row houses are mixed with single family buildings and apartment buildings – and the citizens like it just fine. Areas where a high-rise building is clearly out of scale with everything around it, but the neighbors have gotten used to it and actually like it. If another high-rise came along they would like that just fine, too. Areas that are in transition, where 70% of the “urban fabric” points to one style and the remaining 30% is a complete mix of mid-rises, high-rises, shoppettes, institutions with parking around them, and whatever. A skilled urban designer could look at the area and say that the dominant urban form is “X” and that should be reinforced. Or that it’s “X on the way to being Y” and that should be encouraged. But the neighborhood residents might disagree with both. Yes, it’s not a definable form, and yes it looks like a mess, but we like it that way. There are areas where the clear preference of the residents is not to have a particular form that you are trying to reinforce or work toward. And it’s not clear why the city should push for a different result.

I think this underlines one of the important disconnects in planning. Planners are trained to look at neighborhoods and see what they “could become” and urban designers are trained to study form and decide what the form “should be”. Sometimes that is exactly right – but not always. Cities are complex places, full of residents and property owners with different and conflicting goals. Isn’t it just possible that some areas could be happy without being on the way to something different? And that would be just fine for the future of the city?

That’s why form-based zoning is a great innovation – some of the time, and in some places. But to jump on the bandwagon and say that form-based approaches can cure the ills of zoning is overstating the case. It cures problems related to over-focusing on uses and under-focusing on building form in areas that have or want to have a particular urban form. But that’s not all of the city – and it may not even be a majority of the city. Like any legal tool, form-based zoning needs to be used thoughtfully and carefully. And that’s why most major of America’s major cities have chosen to use form-based zoning selectively – rather than trying to apply it everywhere.

Unfortunately, we sometimes do just the opposite – at least in America’s older urban neighborhoods. We draft our plans after looking carefully at the neighborhoods and cities that are already built. We study the scale, the form, the uses, the traffic flow, the parking. But then we prepare solutions as if our cities were blank pieces of paper – as if they were greenfields. We look at all that the “messiness” that makes up most neighborhoods and we squint hard and say “Hey – I think I see a pattern there. You know, maybe it should all fit into that pattern.” And then we draft zoning to make that pattern happen. If we use traditional Euclidean zoning, the pattern is set by traditional tools – land uses, lot sizes, minimum setbacks, and building heights. If we use form-based zoning we define the pattern with different tools – building types, façade types, parking location, specific mixes of uses, and minimum and maximum setbacks.

Sometimes finding and strengthening the pattern inside all that urban fabric is exactly right. The neighborhood is fraying at the edges – owners are not investing because “there’s no ‘there’ there.” Supporting a major redevelopment project that strengthens the urban form could be exactly the catalyst needed to spur investment and save the neighborhood. But if you’re not planning for a big redevelopment project – if the only investments are being made by small-scale property owners who come forward in ones and twos over the years as their needs and desires change, forcing those individual investors into a preferred design pattern could be exactly the wrong thing to do. It could discourage investment and force existing uses into buildings that don’t work for them in order to reinforce a pattern that only designers can see.

Planners may look down an older residential block face and see that the third house from the end is a sore thumb – someone tacked on a commercial façade and its been operated as a small florist shop since pre-zoning days. Neither the use nor the building fits the residential block pattern. But to those who live and work on the block, it’s always been there – it is part of the neighborhood even if you can’t find a pattern or a typology that fits it. When the building needs to be substantially rebuilt, traditional zoning says “Time’s up – gotta move three blocks over to the commercial strip” – even if the residents of the block disagree. More modern zoning might say “OK, you can stay, but the new building has to look like a house – none of those display windows on a residential block.”

Either way, zoning theory says that forcing a change to fit into the pattern is all for the best. The business will either move or fit in better, and either way the block is better off. But what if the florist moves to the commercial strip and the odd looking storefront (or the whole house) stays vacant. It’s hard to sell because it’s not quite a house and not quite a store. If it’s a “hot” neighborhood some speculator might pick it up, strip off the storefront, and resell it as a house-that-looks-like-a-house. But everything works in “hot” neighborhoods. What if it’s a “not-so-hot” neighborhood and speculators are not standing in line to invest in odd houses. The building stands vacant (or at least the storefront is vacant) and the block is worse off than it started.

When it comes to mature cities, many blocks and many neighborhoods don’t fit into a visible pattern – and they don’t need to. The goals of planning should shift from finding and reinforcing the design pattern for every block to allowing reinvestment that will keep the structures occupied and productive without increasing negative impacts on the neighbors. For those neighbors, the improvement created by forcing the florist to move away or to work out of “patterned” building is theoretical, but the damage caused by an odd, vacant building is real. In mature cities and “not-hot” neighborhoods, zoning should probably pay more attention to the micro-impacts of small scale reinvestment decisions than the macro-level impacts of imposed patterns.

A Better Way to Zone discusses these concerns and identifies “Living with Nonconformities” as one of the ten principles that can help us create more livable cities.

The sheer number of zoning-related discussions at APA and the topics of those sessions underscore the first lesson I identify in Chapter 6 of A Better Way to Zone — Euclidean zoning is both very durable and clearly flawed. While we continue to try to fix zoning in myriad ways, most of those fixes assume that the basic structure will remain in place. APA’s discussions addressed zoning from three directions

The first group of sessions fed our continuing interest in Euclidean hybrid zoning and its history.

• “An Instruction Manual for Advanced Regulatory Drafting” aimed at building mastery of the current system.

• “A Conversation with Richard Babcock” highlighted the career of a master land use lawyer best known for his book The Zoning Game and its analysis of how zoning really works.

• A second set of topics related directly to the Ten Principles outlined in Chapter 7 of A Better Way to Zone.

• “Market-Tested Zoning Tools for Mixed Use” was all about The Mixed Use Middle.

• “Controlling Large Houses” reflected our growing interest in Attainable Housing and communities that support it

• “New Zoning Techniques Using GIS” reinforced the need for Better Webbing

Finally, a third set of discussions focused on the increasing use of zoning as a tool to promote environmental sustainability – the latest chapter in how we mold the robust framework of Euclidean hybrid zoning to meet new challenges.

• “Saving the World through Zoning” outlined a model sustainable land use code under development by the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute in Denver.

• “Integrating Planning and Ecosystem Science” discussed exactly that.

• “Permitting and Standards for Wind Power” addressed the increasing overlaps between zoning and alternative energy sources.

In 2008, APA is celebrating 100 years of conferences, and the landmark New York City zoning ordinance turns 92. For almost a century planners have looked at zoning to do the heavy lifting in American land use regulation – and there is every reason to believe that will continue.

Sure, we poke fun at the “planner-ese” and “legal-ese” jargon. And we shake our heads as we tell horror stories about how the zoning code tied some poor property owner up in knots. We bemoan the fact that in spite of all those laws we still seem to get pretty mediocre development most of the time. But complaining about zoning is like complaining about downtown parking - it’s everybody’s right even if you don’t have a workable solution at hand. In spite of all its problems, we have learned to live with zoning because we’ve found that it is almost infinitely changeable. There are as many flavors of zoning as there are cities. Zoning codes in real cities are like snowflakes - no two are alike. They have been modified so many times in so many ways for so many reasons that they ought to fit each city like a glove. But they don’t, and we still complain and amend them constantly.

While we’re learning to live with zoning, we should start learning from zoning. We need to look at how and why zoning evolved, how it got so complex, how well it does its job (or not), and how we can make it work better. The key is not just to change zoning — we do that all the time. When it’s too rigid we make it more flexible, and when that produces unexpected results we try to add predictability. The key is to learn from the mistakes of the past and not repeat them.

A Better Way to Zone tries to do just that. The first chapter reviews how zoning has evolved through PUDs and performance zoning and on into form-based tools. Each of those trends represents a reform movement that was and is partially successful, and we can identify what parts work. The next chapters identify three reasons why we have only seen half-solutions - why we still can’t seem to get zoning right.

• Some of the assumptions behind early zoning are no longer true;
• Land use is now driven by some powerful forces that zoning has not addressed; and
• We forgot that zoning is part of a city governance system - not a world unto itself.

The heart of A Better Way to Zone is a discussion of ten ways that we can change zoning to avoid false assumptions, respond to new land use drivers, and improve urban governance. It does not assume that most citizens want to throw out their zoning codes - even if the planners sometimes do. Just the opposite. It assumes that most citizens want the predictability that even flawed zoning provides - particularly near their homes. And that most city residents want zoning problems corrected in ways that don’t rock the boat too much or too fast.

Starting from the zoning code you have (not an idealized model) is one aspect of good governance. Fixing it in ways that do not repeat the mistakes of the past is another. So if the biggest lesson of the past is that zoning is here to stay, the second biggest may be just as obvious - that one size never fits all.