The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has ignited a vital conversation about systemic racism across all sectors of our society. An important part of this discussion is how we design our cities, which has been guided by policy rooted in racist history, and reinforced by decisions that continue to divide our cities and create social barriers today.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the racial inequity that exists in North American cities, with racialized neighbourhoods being hit disproportionately hard by the virus. The solution to combat systemic racism in urban design reads much like the solution to make cities more resilient against future pandemics. At the foundation of the challenge is housing.
Zoning regulations control where people live and how our neighbourhoods look. By assigning properties into different categories of parkland, commercial, residential and industrial uses, zoning establishes the rules for development. Zoning was created a century ago to ensure factories were not built near houses, but it has a darker history that influences social and racial divisions in our cities today.
At the turn of the last century, U.S. cities used racial zoning, restricting where non-white residents could live, to establish segregated residential neighbourhoods. In 1917, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the practice of race-based planning, but white residents pressured city governments to find a new solution to maintain their “neighbourhood character,” an expression still used today to oppose different types of housing development. Cities circumvented the ruling by implementing a new form of exclusionary zoning, making it illegal to build anything but a single-family home in certain neighbourhoods, often with minimum lot and house sizes.
This new policy did not hide from its intention and delivered the same results. By ensuring that only people who could afford the most expensive housing type would have access to single-family zoned communities, neighbourhood segregation continued for less affluent residents, which was often connected to race.
Most residential neighbourhoods in Canadian cities still fall under a single-family zoning category called R-1. The exclusionary effects of this remain today: they create economic barriers to neighbourhood access that affect a higher proportion of racialized residents and contribute to the widening wealth gap between communities.
Minneapolis, the city that re-ignited the Black Lives Matter movement, has made an ambitious move to confront the effects of single-family zoning and its racist history in housing segregation, by implementing a plan called Minneapolis 2040. It was approved only a few months before Floyd was killed. The policy is based on the ideal that every neighbourhood, even the most exclusive, should be available to all residents, regardless of social or economic background.
sourceWinipres
