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partly resolved. The Charlotte City Council essentially
bought the developer off with nearly $800 000 of
public money. They gave his development company
10 acres (4 hectares) of city-owned land elsewhere in
the city, valued at $194 000. The city also pledged to
pay $460 000 to clean up environmental problems at
the new site, and to pay $192 000 to convey an ease-
ment to prohibit future industrial use on the original
site. In return, the developer agreed to pay the city a
nominal $50 000 for the new site and not to protest
the downzoning of the old site from industrial to
neighborhood mixed-use. While this helped untangle
this particular mess, many observers of the civic scene
CHAPTER FIVE
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GROWTH MANAGEMENT, DEVELOPMENT CONTROL AND URBAN DESIGN
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in Charlotte saw the city’s actions as setting a difficult
precedent – essentially paying developers to follow
the city’s plans. Others argued that these actions con-
stituted an even more troublesome trend: paying
money to achieve a downzoning established a 
de facto
taking, with the city acknowledging the need to pay
compensation to a private property owner for reduc-
ing the value of his land by a zoning change desired
by city planners.
This messy story highlights the importance of zon-
ing in American urban and suburban development,
and it’s worth spending a little time reviewing how it
has evolved, and how it is possible to reform it by
using other strands within the history of American
development.
DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT CONTROL
While many people think of zoning in America as a
twentieth-century concept, derived from the 1926
Supreme Court decision noted earlier, its origins on
the continent go much further back into history, to
the Spanish Laws of the Indies, codified in 1573 by
King Phillip II of Castille to regulate the founding of
new settlements in the New World. These Laws were
a landmark in the history of urban development of
the new continent, but in fact they codified earlier
practices based on Royal Ordinances sent from
Seville as early as 1513. The Laws specified a physical
urban structure with a standardized grid plan of
square blocks around a large central plaza which
contained civic buildings (Broadbent: p. 43). In the
same way that Roman civilization stamped symbolic
geometric plans on virgin soil as urbanization
expanded, so did the Spanish in what are now
California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Florida.
This typology of civic buildings within a central square
set in a rectangular grid is precisely the same as the
courthouse square towns of the American South and
Mid-west that we have noted earlier.
However, the Spanish town-planning codes did a
lot more than set out a grid of streets around a
plaza. They specified sizes, and orientations to take
advantage of climatic factors such as sun, shade, and
wind direction. They established street hierarchies,
and promoted urban devices such as arcades. The
codes also extended to regulations for the best size
and mix of population, the housing of animals, the
placement of hospitals, and even fines for lax clergy!
(Broadbent: p. 45).
More directly pertinent to our contemporary situ-
ation are the various codes developed and employed
in the nineteenth-century expansion of American sub-
urbs, such as the one used by Frederick Law Olmsted
at his Chicago suburb of Riverside (1869). Olmsted
used codes to enforce the precepts of his master plan,
and to maintain the desired garden suburb aesthetic
recently imported from England (as we noted in
Chapter 2). At Riverside, like its precedents and many
successors, the houses were set back a uniform dis-
tance from the street, and a specific tree planting
placement was enforced on the ‘semi-public’ spaces of
private front yards as well as the public realm of the
street to create the enfolding green canopy so typical
of these suburbs. One of Olmsted’s great successors,
John Nolen, used similar devices in his work, a partic-
ularly fine example of which is the great, green boule-
vard of Queens Road, in Nolen’s streetcar suburb of
Myers Park (1911) in Charlotte (see Figure 5.6). For
many decades during the modernist period of the
twentieth century, Nolen was an obscure and
neglected figure, but he was rediscovered during the
1980s and 1990s with the renewed interest in tradi-
tional neighborhood planning. He is now recognized
as perhaps America’s greatest town planner of the early
decades of the twentieth century.
Codes like the ones for Myers Park were generally
formulated as restrictive covenants, binding on all
homeowners in a development, and covered a wide
range of matters, including provisions that were
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES