ABOUT THE NATIONAL ZONING ATLAS

WHAT:

Zoning laws, adopted by perhaps 30,000 local governments across the country, dictate much of what can be built in the United States. The National Zoning Atlas is helping us better understand these sometimes-opaque but incredibly influential laws by depicting their key attributes in an online, user-friendly map.

The National Zoning Atlas encompasses several disciplines. It is a legal research project, as it delves deeply into the regulatory frameworks that dictate so much of the way we use our land. It is a data science project, and it deploys novel systems of collecting, analyzing, and displaying geospatial and regulatory data. It is a digital humanities project, innovative in its methodology and having the potential to unlock new research on the central instrument that shapes our urban built environment, social relations and hierarchies, and geographies of opportunity. It is a social science project that will improve our understanding of our politics, society, and economy - and expand our collective ability to reimagine future, alternative, and reparative trajectories. And it is a computer science project, deploying machine learning and natural language processing to expand our understanding of how algorithms can read complex regulatory texts.

WHY:

Zoning laws have direct impacts on housing availability, transportation systems, the environment, economic opportunity, educational opportunity, and our food supply.  Despite codes’ importance, ordinary people can’t make heads or tails of them. They are too complex and inscrutable. 

The National Zoning Atlas will help people better understand zoning, which would in turn broaden participation in land use decisions, identify opportunities for zoning reform, and narrow a wide information gap that currently favors land speculators, institutional investors, and homeowners over socioeconomically disadvantaged groups.  It would also enable comparisons across jurisdictions, illuminate regional and statewide trends, and strengthen national planning for housing production, transportation infrastructure, and climate response.  

To understand the kinds of things a zoning atlas can show, review this research paper documenting the findings of the Connecticut Zoning Atlas (the first statewide atlas) and this research paper in HUD Cityscape describing the motivations of the project.

HOW:

Here are operating principles that guide everything we do:

• Deploy data for the public good ​

• Evaluate and adapt methods and approaches ​

• Collaborate broadly ​

• Cultivate up-and-coming talent ​

• Assume that this is a solvable problem, worth solving 

As far as the mechanics of the project, to date it has relied on manual reviews of thousands of pages of zoning code texts and their corresponding maps. A how-to guide for these reviews is available for free download. The project is also using grant funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Housing and Community Development Community Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program to automate this process so we can more quickly map the 30,000 localities estimated to use zoning.

WHO:

The National Zoning Atlas has its roots in 2020, when Sara Bronin created the first Atlas project. For an initial period, staff were housed at Cornell University, but now, most central team members have migrated to an independent nonprofit. While external teams have provided critical support in geographies of interest, the bulk of current and future work will be conducted by central Atlas team members.  Overall, 320 people have participated in the project in some form, including representatives of academic institutions, nonprofits, private firms, and government agencies, with students providing important support.

Because this project aims to expand knowledge for the public good, its resulting online atlases will remain free to view regardless of who pitches in to create them.