My notes on Germany 1648 to 1806 , Germany 1800 to 1840s , Waikato the golden age 1840s to 1850s , Waikato 1860s , Gentry & Speculators , The beginning of modern planning: Water, Sewage, Housing, Transport, City Centre, Markets and Zoning, 1890s: Introduction, Dwellings & Lots
To understand zoning in the late nineteenth century we must consider three aspects. First, we look to the beginning of the nineteenth century when German-speaking town leaders had ‘the right to choose their own citizens’ (Walker, p. 296) because ‘a free community must have the right to choose its members’ (Walker, p. 363). However, from the middle of the century, town leaders were being told ‘that a man has a right to live and better himself and must do it somewhere’ (Walker, p. 348). Thus, by the 1870s, the old ways in which hometown leaders could exclude people was ‘destroyed’ (Walker, p. 405). Second, ‘horse-cars were generally priced beyond the reach of the masses. Electrification [trams] did not automatically bring lower fares, especially since the city government were at first burdened with the cost of electrification and of constructing new lines. ‘A consensus among administrators and city councilmen was that the streetcar system as a whole could not be permitted to lose money’ (Ladd, p. 205). Third, ‘working-class houses should be located within walking distance of the factory ... transfer of the labour force to garden suburbs in the periphery was not a good option’ (Wagenaar, p. 214). Meanwhile in America, as in many other places, ‘Prior to the 1880s, most people walked to work ... the rich tended to live closest to their jobs’ (Fischel p. 172). In Germany, ‘Legislation in the 1860s granted cities new powers to create districts as well as to ban factories’ (Ladd, p. 187). Bingo! ‘The immense urban growth in the late nineteenth century spelled the end of the centuries-old “walking city” throughout much of Europe’ (Ladd, p. 201), ‘It was the poor who still had to live close to work ... walking long distances was not an option’ (Hirt, p. 104). If you could not afford to drive or be driven to work, you could not live in a factory-free sprawling suburb.
German Hometowns, Community, State, and General Estate, 1648-1871, by Mack Walker
Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, 1860-1914, by Brian Ladd
Town Planning in the Netherlands since 1800: chapter on The Urban Challenge 1871-1914, Cor Wagenaar
Zoning Rules, by William A. Fischel
The situation in cities of the 1890s is exemplified by the Dutch city of Schiedam, which ‘between 1870 and 1890 saw industries flourishing. The flip side of this was massive pollution of the coal-fired distilleries and glassworks, alcoholism, open sewers and cholera epidemics, and the squalid housing of the workers’ (Schiedam also known as Black Nazareth). As a result, the city of Leeuwarden (NL) banned disposal of excrement in the canals in 1893 (p.207 Wagenaar). Similarly, in Kirikiriroa Hamilton, a pack of beagles was running loose about the township (Gibbons, p. 68), cattle were prohibited after sunset inside a 1-kilometre radius of the post offices on either side of the river (Gibbbons, p. 79), and the streets of Hamilton reeked of animal droppings, stagnant water, and decaying vegetables (Gibbons, p. 101). The problems were compounded by an open-air drain that ran (when it did in fact move) through the centre of Victoria, Hood, Collingwood, and Anglesea streets block, collecting food and sewage waste from houses and businesses. In wet weather the drain filled up and the stinking muck seeped beyond its banks, and “the back yards in most cases were reeking with bad smells” (Gibbons, p. 89 & p. 106). A man was hired to remove the contents of lavatories. He rumbled with his cart through the middle of Victoria Street, collecting waste from closets in leaking tins. People would hold their noses as he went by (Gibbons, p.107). After fifteen premises were burnt in the Victoria Street area, the borough council formed a bylaw requiring new buildings in the central business area to be constructed from permanent materials (Gibbons, p. 109).
Meanwhile, in Germany, tension arose between Leipzig’s bourgeois culture and that of the working-class inhabitants of the ward. The city council’s communications on the subject bristled with disdain, repeatedly mentioning the visible laundry that caused “bitter remarks and mockery” among promenaders and reprimanding the ward residents for having no sense of “morals and order” (Poling, p. 32). In Paderborn (DE), there had been ‘concern that too easy entrance into the city centre would invite in those prostitutes that had been offering their services just beyond the gates’ (Poling, p.97). In Cologne’s Neustadt, land prices were so high that private developers were prepared to build nothing but continuous rows of tall buildings (Ladd, p. 187). The pressure of the market led private developers to build as high (typically five stories) and as extensively (three-quarters of the building plot) as the building code permitted (Ladd, p. 107). Of all the dwellings in Berlin, 49% had only one room that could be heated (Stubben, p. 35). Half a million people lived in overcrowded apartments. Just one percent of Berlin’s inhabitants owned the entire housing stock and half of the city’s politicians were recruited from this group (Wagenaar, p. 196).
City Building by Joseph Stubben
In my reading of Zoning, I notice three supporting groups. In the first, the urban planner Reinhard Baumeister and Franz Adickes, the Mayor of Frankfurt, were the ‘leading proponents of zoned building regulations’ (p.189 Ladd). Second was the ‘Public Health Associations’ (Ladd, p. 38), who were concerned about ‘unhygienic conditions and unscrupulous housing speculators’ (Poling, p. 118). Third were the type of leaders Friedrich Engels observed in 1840s Manchester, who were ‘ensuring that the bourgeoisie would not have to come into contact with the homes of the poor workers’ (Ladd, p. 234). The ‘common enemy was the way of life associated with the Mietskaserne [tenements / rental barracks]’ (Ladd, p. 231). ‘The advance of the dreaded Mietskaserne was the particular development that reform-minded city official proposed to stop’ (Ladd, p. 186). These looming tenement blocks ultimately became a visible symbol of all the evils city planning was supposed to suppress (Ladd, p.79). Franz Adickes observed that ‘It is possible, without jeopardizing already established property values or actual revenues, to make much greater hygienic demands on buildings that have not yet been built than it is feasible to make on buildings already in use. The first sophisticated attempt at zoning was Frankfurt’s 1891 building ordinance which aimed for the desire for more light and air in and around dwellings which implied the need for lower building heights, larger courtyards, and, where possible, detached housing’ (Ladd, p. 189). ‘Earlier housing reformers had often advocated for detached single-family homes ... [but] many had to acknowledged that this model was unreachable in dense rapidly growing cities’ (Poling, p.120). Frankfurt’s pioneering ordinance of 1891 had provided for a functional division of the outer city into industrial, residential, and mixed-use zones (Ladd, p. 230). In 1892, the Prussian government issued new, more restrictive building regulations ‘... limiting the height of buildings to four stories and permitting no more than half the building lot to be built on’ (as opposed to two-thirds for the inner city) (Ladd, p. 192). Some others city rules included ‘no more than eight dwellings shall in any place be built under one continuous roof or without a break in building from the ground upwards’ (Hirt, p. 162).
City administration had failed to find a happy medium between unhealthy Mietskasernen and unaffordable villas (Ladd, p. 188). He [Franz Adickes, Mayor of Frankfurt] was interested in building restrictions of wider benefit, mainly a desire to provide low-density housing for the economically weak (Ladd, p. 189). The fact is that the actual situation did not develop according to the theoretical model. The immediate purpose of zoning was to stop the spread of the Mietskaserne; behind it lay a desire to stabilize the land market and regulate its functioning, which involved speculation and entailed the buying of land and withholding it from development in anticipation of windfall profits (Ladd, p. 191). Thus, the hoped-for result had not materialized (Ladd, p. 194). Opponents of reform could point to Frankfurt’s high land prices and rents as evidence of the reformers’ failure (Ladd, p. 201).
Sonia Hirt wrote of Reinhard Baumeister (1833-1917), ‘In his view, it made sense to categorize buildings and the activities within them in three classes and locate them in three types of zones: The first consists of large-scale industry and wholesaling ... but also the homes of workers and even factory owners; the second includes all trades which require direct contact with the public, and similarly the homes which must be united with the trade premises; the third includes homes whose owners have no trade and have different occupations (landlords, officials, merchants, factory owners, workers)’. The idea of three classes of building was not new. London’s Metropolitan Buildings Act from 1844, for example, also used three classes, albeit slightly different ones: first class (“dwelling-house,” which today we would call residential), second class (which we would call commercial/industrial), and third class (which we would call public). But this act did not deliberately seek to place the different classes of buildings in different parts of the city. In that, Baumeister was likely a pioneer in this sense. (Hirt, p.135)
Zoned in the USA, by Sonia A. Hirt
Unorganised notes:
Rule: Prohibiting construction on unfinished streets or on streets without adequate water and sewer connections (Ladd, p. 195), Julius Faucher – ‘believed that rising land prices caused by an effective monopoly on a limited housing supply was the major cause of deteriorating housing conditions ... The monopoly on real estate that he believed to be the key cause of urban ills’ (Poling, p. 163). The apartment house is a mere parasite (Hirt, p. 166) and on zoning theory - but what if parts of the theory are wrong, or what if the theory was originally right but parts of it no longer apply? (Hirt, p. 180).
Thank you for posting this insightful understanding!