Split apart: How regulations designated populations to different parts of the city

Abstract

This chapter reviews how urban regulations in history have been used to relegate populations to different parts of the city and its environs. Its main purpose is to place the twentieth-century U.S. zoning experience in historic and international context. To this end, based mostly on secondary sources, the chapter first surveys a selection of major civilizations in history and the regulations they invented in order to keep populations apart. Then, based on primary sources, it discusses the emergence of three methods of residential segregation through zoning which took root in early twentieth-century United States. The three methods are: segregating people by race, segregating them by different land-area standards, and segregating them based on both land-area standards and a taxonomy of single- versus multi-family housing.