What Japan Knows That We Don’t
A country with thirteen zoning categories builds better neighborhoods than a country with fifty. The reason is one word long and we already know it, because it’s sitting in our comprehensive plan.
A few weeks ago, I met a friend of mine at a bar after their recent trip to Japan. They had just come back from Osaka to Indianapolis and said something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
She’s not a planner. She cuts hair (and is quite good at it). She went to Japan for two weeks with her husband, Curtis (a local bar owner, also a friend) and came home with four hundred photos and, as always when someone travels to the other side of the globe, a look on her face like someone who has seen a color that didn’t exist before they left. It’s that indelible mark of someone inspired.
Over beers (or were they cocktails?) she scrolled through her iPhone as she discussed the great restaurants, the weird customs, the unnervingly silent train riders. Except the teenagers. We both noted teenagers are a globally boisterous demographic.
But she kept stopping on images that for most people would have been unremarkable. Boring, even. But not to us.
One photo showed a narrow street with a house and a Ramen shop sharing a wall. A three-story building with apartments above and a tiny bar below, the bar maybe ten feet wide, six stools, a curtain over the door. Some photos of the Golden Gai at night, packed bars with barely an elbow between them. A photo of a colorful Pokémon vending machine on a residential sidewalk next to someone’s garden over strewn with hanging plants. A grade school or kindergarten on the ground floor of what looked like an apartment building. A miniature dentist’s office in what was a house, I think?
Looking through the pictures, it reminded me of our own trips out of the country and some of the photos I’ve taken. It made me think, even with every use just placed together and random architectural styles mashed next to each other, these chaotic, frenzied places were somehow even more vibrant and dare I say, beautiful, than the tightly zoned, regulated, and hugely expensive development seen in the United States.
As I stared off thinking of why I found the pictures so appealing, I turned back to my friend. She says, “everything is just there”
She goes on: “…this magic shop is under the owner’s house which is next to the Sushi restaurant is next to the school. And there’s a Ramen place everywhere.”
Hell, I’m thinking, I would love a Ramen spot even fifteen minutes down the street. Honestly, a Pokemon vending machine would be neat as well.
Besides there being way more people, she couldn’t explain why this felt so different from other places. Even in the smaller Japanese towns, they felt like real places and cities, despite being much smaller in population.
But, I thought in my urban planner brain, I could explain it. And my explanation has nothing to do with culture, or density, or transit, or any of the things Americans usually invoke when they talk about why other cities work. It has to do with one word. And it’s the word that, if applied to American land use, would change everything.
The word is yes.
A story of two default answers
In my first post of the How to Make Places Go series, I introduced the idea of porosity, the permeability of the built fabric, the openings and passages and small frictions that let a neighborhood breathe and create novelty - the building block of all vibrant places. In the second post, I walked you around the other side of that idea: the monoculture of current development patterns such as the five-over-one, the imporous slab that adds density without adding life. Posts one and two were about what, what novelty looks like, and what its absence looks like.
This post is about why. Why American cities produce the impermeable fabric even when we don’t want to, and why Japanese cities produce the porous fabric even when no one sets out to.
Here is how zoning works in the United States.
Our Zoning is Like a Spreadsheet in Three Dimensions
Say you own a lot. You want to do something with it. You look up your zoning designation. The code tells you what you are allowed to do and the list is short. If your new lot is zoned something like R-4 Single-Family Residential, you may build a single-family house. You may not build a duplex. You may not build a small apartment. You may not open a shop. You may not run a daycare. You may not operate a business that has customers visit your home, unless you apply for a home occupation permit, which may or may not be granted at the discretion of a hearing officer who may or may not have ever operated a business. You do not pass go; do not collect $200.
Current zoning in most of our cities is mostly a lot of saying what you can’t do rather than what you can. And these strict rules vary widely from municipality to municipality, meaning one restriction may be even more pronounced just across the street. In my opinion, this type of land use regulation is antithetical to the American ethos of individual liberty.
If you want to do anything that isn’t on the short list of permitted uses, you need a variance or a rezoning (or you can “know a guy”). A variance requires a public hearing at which your neighbors and/or staff can testify against you. A rezoning or development plan requires a petition to public planners, then typically another public hearing and then recommendation to the city council, and lastly, a vote. The process takes months. Sometimes years. It costs thousands of dollars in fees and professional services. And at any point, it can be killed by the handful of Peggy Sue neighbors with their Rachel Carson books who show up to the hearing and say you haven’t thought of the birds, or the parking. Always, the parking.
The default answer in American land use is no. We have two million lawyers in the US, and good darn if we won’t put those to use. The landowner may assume that, usually, everything is prohibited unless specifically permitted. This means burden falls on the owner to prove that they should be allowed to do what they want to do with their own land. Us planners have a name for this logic: Euclidean zoning, named after the 1926 Supreme Court case that validated it in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co.1 A century later, Euclidean zoning still defines most American cities, and a city like Detroit or Ann Arbor can carry thirty or more separate zoning categories, each with its own narrow list of permitted uses.2
Here is how zoning works in Japan.
You own a lot. You want to do something with it. You look up your zone. Japan has thirteen categories nationally (well twelve until 2018, when a Countryside Residential Zone was added to keep farmland in the urban fringe).3 The code tells you the maximum nuisance level tolerated in your zone. If your proposed use falls below that threshold, you build it. No hearing. No variance. No petition. No neighbors testifying against you. You’re good! Your neighborhood school can be next to the residences it serves. You can walk your children to daycare.
If a noodle shop generates less nuisance than the maximum your zone allows, you can open a noodle shop. If a duplex generates less nuisance than the maximum, you can build a duplex. If a dentist’s office in your living room generates less nuisance than the maximum, you can hang a sign and start drilling.
The default answer in Japanese zoning is yes. Everything is permitted unless it exceeds the nuisance threshold. The burden falls on the government to prove that your proposed use would cause harm, not on you to prove you should be allowed. Now that sounds like freedom!
However, this distinction of inclusive versus exclusive sounds abstract until you see what it produces on the ground.
Cascading effects
Japan’s most restrictive residential zone is called Category I Exclusively Low-Rise Residential. The name sounds strict. In an American context, “exclusively residential” would mean houses and nothing else. In Japan, Category I still permits:
- Houses, including multi-family housing up to the height limit
- Small shops or offices under 50 square meters (roughly 500 square feet) as long as the commercial space occupies less than half the building
- Elementary schools and junior high schools
- Temples and shrines
- Libraries
- Medical clinics
- Nursery schools4
This is the most restrictive zone. It already allows more mixed use than most American residential zones allow at their most permissive.
And the system is cumulative. Planners sometimes call it a “cascade”: each zone up the intensity scale includes everything permitted in the zone below it, plus additional uses. By the time you reach Category I Residential Zone several tiers up (and one of the most common zones in Japanese cities) you can build houses, apartments of any size, shops and offices up to 3,000 square meters, universities, hospitals, and hotels. No conditional use permit. No variance. No hearing. By right.
Residential, in this system, just means residential. There is no regulatory distinction between single-family and multifamily, between owned and rented, between one household and ten. A house is a residence. A triplex is a residence. A ten-story apartment block is a residence. What distinguishes them is not what they are called but how much light they block, how much traffic they generate, and how much floor area they cover relative to their lot — the Floor Area Ratio, Building Coverage Ratio, and slant-plane rules that shape the envelope.5 Those are the real constraints. The legal category of “residence” is not.
There is only one zone in the entire Japanese system where a use is truly excluded: the Exclusively Industrial zone, where residential uses are prohibited because heavy industrial activity (foundries, chemical processing, large-scale manufacturing, or things like data centers) generates nuisances at a level genuinely incompatible with habitation. That is the one separation every zoning system should make, and it is the only one Japan makes. Every other zone in the country is mixed-use by default. These uses are far from residential.
The result is that Japanese neighborhoods have, without any mixed-use overlay district, without any transit-oriented development bonus, or without any of the bureaucratic machinery American cities have built to manufacture walkability, the exact urban fabric every American planning initiative of the last thirty years has been trying to create.
A corner store in the residential neighborhood. A daycare near the apartments. A dentist in the house. A noodle shop next to the kindergarten. Everything my friend photographed in Osaka and couldn’t explain. It’s all there because the code allows it to be there. And not because a planner designed it or because a developer proposed it. And not because a hearing officer approved it.
Because the default answer is yes. And that makes places happen. It makes places like Osaka go.
Impact, not identity
I want to pause and address something American planners will be thinking here: but what about quality? What about neighborhood character? What about protecting residents from incompatible uses? What about the lawsuits?!
These are legitimate concerns. They are also the concerns that have been used for a hundred years to justify the exclusionary zoning that built the landscape we now spend billions trying to fix.
Should urbanism reflect society or should it seek to change it?
Just as a built environment reflects its society, it also shapes it. Our responding built environment, then, is recursive, and what we allow to get build not only says something about us but also changes us. If we don’t permit anything anywhere near anyone, we will always have long pick-up lines outside elementary schools. We will have to drive far away to see Grandma at her nursing home. We won’t have corner retail that our kids can walk to for a gallon of milk. And we will be increasingly taxed to keep up the lane miles of our geography of oil-slicked speedways.
“Protecting neighborhood character” is the phrase that has kept duplexes out of single-family zones, kept corner stores off residential streets, kept Black families out of white neighborhoods, and kept America’s cities locked inside a regulatory framework designed for a world of coal-fired factories and horse-drawn milk wagons.
Cities are made of people. But people build places, where people live and the structures that host their activities. They are also made up of spaces, the rooms between built forms that connect and reinforce interactions. And cities are made up of relationships between these elements, helping to shape the built forms that shape the city itself. The responding resonance of these elements together creates what I term spatial movementality, or the “flow of place”. This is the emergent dimension that shapes dynamism of places, actualization for residents, and wealth creation through empowerment of that actualization. Great places allow things to happen. When things are allowed to happen, people can co-create and build wealth. Our land use policies directly impact this.
Japan addresses the quality concern not by prohibiting uses but by setting performance thresholds. The question is not “is this a commercial use in a residential zone?” The question is “does this use generate noise, traffic, pollution, shadow, or other nuisances beyond the level this zone is calibrated to tolerate?”
A quiet noodle shop with six tables that closes at nine o’clock? No meaningful nuisance. Permitted. A grandmother’s sewing business in a converted garage? Quiet. Permitted. Done. A micro-bakery selling cardamom buns on Saturday mornings? Fragrant, briefly busy, otherwise invisible. Permitted. A nightclub with a sound system that rattles windows until three in the morning? Exceeds the threshold. Not permitted and not because it’s a nightclub, but because it’s loud and boisterous at the wrong hours. We all have to work in the morning, after all. Well, most of us.
This is regulation by impact rather than regulation by category. It produces a remarkable outcome: Japanese cities are simultaneously the most mixed-use and the most orderly cities in the developed world. The presence of a Ramen shop on a residential street doesn’t degrade the neighborhood. It improves it. The presence of a dentist’s office in a house doesn’t threaten property values but instead it raises them, because now the neighborhood has a dentist you can walk to. This means you have access to care and the dentist has access to patients that builds wealth for him. The mixing of uses isn’t what American zoning was designed to prevent. The mixing of nuisances is what it was designed to prevent. Japan separates the two concepts. America just hasn’t got there.
And here’s the part that makes the category-based approach look especially obsolete: the twenty-first-century city is not the twentieth-century city. Most of the uses that Euclidean zoning was built to separate out don’t exist anymore. The nuisances of the 1920s (like the slaughterhouses, the coal yards, the belching foundries) have either disappeared from urban economies or been regulated into cleanliness by environmental law. What’s replacing them is the opposite of a nuisance: the software studio in the garage where the Apple corporation was built, the potter firing a small electric kiln, the CNC shop run by one person from a back room, the three-table restaurant with a single cook. A micro-manufacturing leathery. These are the economic activities of our actual moment, and they are quiet, usually clean, and small. These are not your 150 acre steel mills of yesteryear.
A zoning system that refuses to let people live above the businesses they run is not protecting neighborhoods but rather it’s preventing the kind of bootstrapped, mixed-income, self-empowered commerce that lets neighborhoods stabilize themselves from the inside. In a real sense, the most effective protection against displacement is the permission to build a small business without moving away. Japan’s code permits this by default. Ours forbids it by default and then spends public money trying to simulate the result.
The most American ideal is one that involves entrepreneurship and the ability to provide services to others at a profit that empowers oneself. Why does our land use make this difficult to achieve when it should be doing the opposite?
Nonconforming Indianapolis
Now let me bring this back to my city.
As a Big Fan of cities, fondly look and think about the places in Indianapolis where life is richest. The historic and walkable mixed-use Mass Ave. The quirky and hole-in-the-wall Fountain Square. The early railroad suburb of Irvington. The scruffy blocks on East 10th Street where, say, a local taqueria operates out of a former residence. Much of what we love of these places would be technical illegal to build today. We call these nonconforming uses. Most American cities have hundreds or thousands of them. A tattoo parlor on Keystone Avenue is operating in a building zoned residential. The barber on the near east side who cuts hair in his converted garage is running a business in an D8 zone, residential only.
Margarite, a woman on Rural Street who sells baked goods from her front porch on Saturday mornings is, in the eyes of the code, a lawbreaker. Her property is zoned D5, Dwelling District Five.
Despite being considered a “Walkable Neighborhood District”, small shops are still banned. See, in American planning, only residential is considered a neighborhood.
But these small entrepreneurs are the people who make neighborhoods alive. And the code, if enforced to the letter, would shut every one of them down.
Japan would not shut them down. Japan would not even notice them. A barber in a converted garage is a low-nuisance commercial activity in a residential area and permitted by default, below the threshold, no paperwork required. A woman selling baked goods from her porch is home enterprise of the most benign variety imaginable and permitted everywhere in Japan, from the most restrictive residential zone to the urban core. A taqueria in a former house is adaptive reuse that generates moderate foot traffic and the smell of grilled onions, both of which fall well within the tolerance of a mixed neighborhood. Permitted. Who doesn’t like tacos?
But here is the surprising part:
Our comprehensive plan in Indianapolis already agrees with Japan’s land use. And yours might too.
The Pattern Book and the secret we already wrote down
Most American cities, Indianapolis among them, operate under a two-tiered planning system that most non-planners never notice. At the top is a document called the comprehensive plan (sometimes the “general plan” or “master plan”), a long-range policy vision for how the city should grow. At the heart of the comprehensive plan is the Land Use Element: a map of typologies, written as a kind of pattern language, describing what kinds of places the city wants to become. Underneath that sits the zoning code: the legally binding ordinance that actually regulates what you can build.
The comprehensive plan is a vision while the zoning code is the contract. The vision is supposed to guide the contract. In practice, they often have almost nothing to do with one another. And that’s part of our problem.
Indianapolis’s comprehensive plan is called Plan 2020, and its Land Use Element is a document called the Marion County Land Use Pattern Book, adopted by the Metropolitan Development Commission in 2017 and followed by township-level land use maps in 2018. The Pattern Book organizes the county into fifteen typologies grouped into three broad families:
- Living Typologies: Rural or Estate Neighborhood, Suburban Neighborhood, Traditional Neighborhood, City Neighborhood
- Mixed-Use Typologies: Village Mixed-Use, Urban Mixed-Use, Core Mixed-Use, Institution-Oriented Mixed-Use
- Working Typologies: Office Commercial, Community Commercial, Regional Commercial, Heavy Commercial, Office/Industrial Mixed-Use, Light Industrial, Heavy Industrial, etc.
And it cross-references these fifteen typologies against about thirty different land uses, producing a matrix of recommendations, not prescriptions, for what belongs where. But read the typology descriptions and something weird happens. They don’t sound like American zoning. They sound like Japan.
The Traditional Neighborhood typology calls for a mix of housing types, small-scale commercial woven into the residential fabric, schools and places of worship at walking distance, and parking accommodated rather than privileged. The City Neighborhood typology goes further: it expects neighborhood-serving businesses on corners and along streets, density between five and fifteen dwelling units per acre (more near transit), and a street grid that supports walking. The Village Mixed-Use typology describes a compact main-street kind of place where housing sits above storefronts and everyday needs are within walking distance.
The Pattern Book says explicitly that the classification system is meant to guide orderly development and protect neighborhood character while remaining flexible and adaptable enough to let neighborhoods grow and change over time. Yes, this is the language of the emergent city. Flexible, adaptable. Hyperlocal.
In Indy, our comp plan has fifteen typologies. Flexible and adaptable. Residential always present outside of industrial zones. Mixed-use normal rather than exceptional. Nuisance calibrated to character. This is the Japanese model described in English.
Here is the problem. The Pattern Book is not the law. The zoning code is the law. And the zoning code does not look like the Pattern Book. It actively forbids what the Pattern book suggests!
When a property owner applies to build something, the Department of Metropolitan Development checks their proposal against the base zoning district (say, D1, D5, C3, I4, etc.); Indianapolis’s zoning ordinance carries dozens of base districts and overlays, each with its own list of permitted uses, special exceptions, and development standards. The Pattern Book shows up as policy context in staff reports, but what the hearing officer can actually approve is bounded by the ordinance itself. This process is not endemic only to Indy, but most likely your city as well.
But this mismatch creates a strange gap. The comprehensive plan describes a Traditional Neighborhood that could include small-scale commercial. The zoning map labels the same ground D5, which permits houses and nothing else. The plan says yes. The code says no. The code wins in staff review.
Every planner I know can recite this tension. The comp plan is where we write down what we believe about cities. The zoning code is where we act on what we still believe, out of habit, about 1926. We updated the vision without updating the instrument.
The same problem shows up across the country. Florida’s statute requires zoning and land use regulations to be consistent with the adopted comprehensive plan; that requirement is widely observed in breach. Most states treat the comp plan as advisory and the zoning ordinance as controlling, which means that the more progressive the plan becomes, the larger the gap between plan and code grows. You can have a beautiful, inclusive, typology-driven Land Use Element sitting on the shelf while your zoning code continues to enforce single-use segregation on the ground.
The result is a bunch of boring cities.
What a zoning code shaped like a comp plan would look like
If the Pattern Book is already Japanese in its logic, the reform isn’t to import something new. It’s to let the zoning code finally catch up to the vision we have already adopted.
What would that look like in practice? Drawing on Japan, on the form-based codes that places like Minneapolis and South Bend adopted in the 2010s,on Lane Kendig’s half-century-old but still underused performance-zoning framework, and on the Pattern Book itself, I’d argue the answer has five pieces.
1. Fewer zones, organized by typology rather than use. Replace the current tangle of fifty-plus base districts and overlays with something like a dozen zones, each corresponding to a Pattern Book typology, say, a Traditional Neighborhood zone, a City Neighborhood zone, a Village Mixed-Use zone, and so on. The zone’s name should describe the kind of place it produces, not the kind of box that can be built inside it.
This creates the kind of flexible most comp plans already have!
2. Cumulative permitting. Borrow Japan’s cascade. The lowest-intensity zone permits houses, small multifamily up to a scale consistent with the neighborhood, home-based commerce below a clear square-footage threshold, schools, daycares, clinics, and places of worship. Each higher-intensity zone includes everything below it, plus additional uses. Residential is always permitted everywhere except in the one truly industrial zone. “Residential” means people live here, whatever the unit count or ownership structure.
3. Performance thresholds in place of use prohibitions. For each zone, define a clear, measurable nuisance envelope: noise limits by time of day, traffic generation caps, odor and emissions standards, shadow and daylight rules, hours of operation for any commercial activity. Any use that stays inside the envelope is permitted by right. Any use that exceeds it isn’t, regardless of what it’s called.
4. Form regulated, uses freed. This is where form-based codes, the approach pioneered by Andrés Duany and the New Urbanists and now most visible in Miami’s citywide Miami 21 code, do real work. Regulate building height, frontage, build-to lines, transparency at the street, parking location (back or side, not front), and the width of the public realm. These are the things that actually determine whether a neighborhood feels coherent. They can be enforced objectively, without reference to what happens inside the building. A noodle shop and a living room can occupy the same façade; the street doesn’t care.
5. By-right everything below the threshold. Real discretion reserved for real impacts. If a proposal meets the form standards and falls below the nuisance thresholds, it is approved administratively, without a hearing, without a vote. The hearing-and-variance machinery that currently strangles small-scale investment would be reserved for genuine edge cases i.e. projects that exceed the envelope, not projects that merely offend someone’s expectation of what category their neighbor belongs to.
What you’d get, if you did all five, is a zoning code that reads like the neighborhood fabric of these areas. A code whose logic is context, whose mechanism is sensitivity, whose default is yes, and whose discretion is reserved for the few cases that actually warrant it. In other words: a zoning code that behaves like a comprehensive plan’s land use element, suggestive where it can be, prescriptive only where it must be.
However, let us be clear, this is not the Japanese code. The legal, political, and cultural contexts are too different for a direct transplant. Japan’s system is national, centralized, and operates inside a property market where buildings depreciate to zero in roughly 22 years, which changes everything about how owners relate to regulation. But the principle is transferable. Flip the default from no to yes. Regulate impact rather than identity. Trust form and performance to do the work that category has been failing to do for a hundred years.
And crucially: we don’t have to invent this. We’ve already written it down. It’s sitting in the Pattern Book, and in every comparable land use element from Portland to Buffalo to Chattanooga. We’ve been describing the city we want to become in the language of flexibility and typology since the early 2000s. We’ve just been regulating it in the language of 1926.
Permission is the thing
Two posts ago, I introduced the idea of novelty being crucial for a healthy built environment. Last post, I showed what its absence looks like. This post is the bridge: novelty is not a design but rather permission.
The narrow lot with the Ramen shop exists because the code permits a noodle shop on a narrow lot. The building with apartments above and a bar below exists because the code permits bars in residential zones. The kindergarten in the apartment building exists because the code permits kindergartens almost everywhere. The vending machine on the residential sidewalk exists because, I am not making this up, nobody needed permission. It is below the threshold. It just appeared.
Novelty is what happens when the default answer is yes. Impermeability is what happens when the default answer is no. An inclusive code produces a porous city. An exclusive code produces a sealed one. The physical form follows the legal structure. The street follows the code.
This is the insight the first three posts of this series have been building toward. The porosity of a neighborhood, the thing your body measures when you walk down a street that hums, is not primarily a product of design. Instead, it is a product of permission. The code shapes the fabric. The fabric shapes the street. The street shapes the life.
Change the code and you change everything downstream.
We’re Getting There
Two cities have already done versions of this work, and both are instructive for others like Indianapolis (or your city).
Minneapolis adopted Minneapolis 2040 in 2019 and built fourteen Built Form Districts that map every parcel in the city. The Built Form Overlay District Map is part of the City’s zoning ordinance and matches the Future Built Form Map approved in Minneapolis 2040. The point of this exercise was alignment: the Land Use Rezoning Study created consistency between the zoning code and the comprehensive plan, with the plan’s twelve future land use categories driving the new zoning. Minneapolis didn’t import a foreign zoning system. It simply made its existing comp plan legally binding through zoning that mirrors it.
South Bend went further and faster. South Bend’s zoning rules are governed by a citywide form-based code effective since 2020, prioritizing the physical form of buildings and their relationship to the street over strict land-use separation. The code eliminates parking minimums citywide and permits missing middle housing by-right. South Bend essentially fused its comp plan and its zoning code into one document about the kind of city it wants to be, then made building that city the default rather than the exception.
The point is, change the code and you unlock your city’s potential.
And we’ve been working on a framework for doing exactly that. I’m calling it the Neighborhood Code, and it organizes the city not by density or building type or land use category but by the thing that actually determines whether a place is alive: how permeable the fabric is, how much the buildings talk to the street, and how many choices you have about where to go next. It apportions cities into subareas or neighborhoods that respond to a similar vernacular and thus should be treated similarly. While most American neighborhoods now are as patchwork of random zoning designations, the NC treats the urban fabric well, like fabric. If you’re stitching a shirt, would you sew say a cheetah print next to a buffalo plaid? Depending on general fashion taste, probably not!
There is a way to calculate and understand our fabric to help suggest what intensity of land use your place should accommodate. The Neighborhood Code gets at that.
It’s taking the subarea typologies we see throughout a city and organizing land use around the context of that area. If a place already has corner stores, multiunit buildings, and taco shops, why shouldn’t future land use reflect and be shaped by those forms?
And it probably looks a lot like the comprehensive plan your city already has.
I’ll start laying that framework out in the next few posts. But I wanted to spend this one on Japan and on our own comprehensive plan here in Indianapolis together, because the juxtaposition does something no amount of policy analysis can do: it shows that the walkable, mixed-use, human-scale neighborhood aka the thing every American city says it wants is neither utopian nor foreign. Rather, it is what happens when the code gets out of the way and lets the vision documents do what they already say.
My friend didn’t come back from Japan marveling at the architecture or the transit system or the urban design. I’m sure those were great too. But she came back marveling that everything was just mixed in. That the shop was next to the house was next to the restaurant was next to the school. That it all just worked together. And the places were allowed to go.
It works because someone, sixty years ago, wrote a code whose default answer was yes.
We’ve written alot of plans, but we haven’t written the code.
Yet.
This is the third in a series about urban porosity and what it means for how we zone our cities. Next time I’m coming back home again to Indianapolis, to the zoning map itself and what it reveals when you hold it up against the city that actually exists.
If you’re enjoying this series, share it with someone who cares about neighborhoods. And if you’re a planner who just read the Pattern Book section and felt something shift, that’s the right feeling. Stay with it.
Next: “Your Zoning Map Is a Fossil”
Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926). The decision upheld the constitutionality of single-use zoning and gave the dominant American zoning logic its name. The case record and opinion: law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/272/365.
Rahul Shankar, “Zoning and Land Use in Japan,” compares use-category counts across Japanese cities and American peers including Detroit and Ann Arbor which thoughtfully breaks down the mismatch between flexible Japanese zoning and its inflexible American counterpart
“Land Use Zones under the City Planning Law in Japan,” describes the 2018 addition of the Countryside Residential Zone and its agricultural-preservation rationale. See also Wikipedia’s “Japanese land law” entry for the current list of thirteen zones:
Japan’s Zoning Laws Explained: Permitted uses in Category I Exclusively Low-Rise Residential are codified under Japan’s Building Standard Law
The envelope controls (Floor Area Ratio, Building Coverage Ratio, height limits, road-width and adjacent-lot diagonal-line limits, and shadow rules) are laid out in English in Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism publication Introduction of Urban Land Use Planning System in Japan: mlit.go.jp/common/001050453.pdf.