Modern Monday: Zoning Laws, Twitter Poetry, & Facebook Narrative

One of the means by which America became McAmerica (f0r those who were wondering) was the use of so-called "zoning laws." The totalitarian sound of these laws ("zones of residence," "zones of industry," "zones of consumption," and so on) betrays the soft despotism resulting from their misuse.

Zoning laws grant local governments the power to regulate the use of "real property" (land). In the United States, driven by a badly-thought out community-planning movement known as Euclid Zoning (after Euclid, Ohio, not the geometrician whose understanding of form the Euclid zoners can never hope to achieve), zoning laws have been used to create suburbia. In suburbia, for those of my readers who have never had to live with it, there are different zones dedicated to specific things, like aisles in a supermarket; there are industrial zones, commercial zones, residential zones, zones left to nature and so on. The compartmentalization of life, though in some hideous sense efficient, means that in effect that the different aspects of life (the home, work, the market, nature) instead of being centered in a local community, are widespread into different areas.

What does this mean? It means that suburbians are reliant on the automobile to get from one aspect of their life to another, that their lives are fragmented, that they cannot enjoy the simple pleasure of walking to a local bakery to get bread or of walking to a local river or lake or forest or, even, of walking to their home and back. This means that they have no attachments to their community, and who can blame them? Suburbia is even more alienated from community (and by community I mean being able to exit your house, wave hello to your neighbors, meet up with friends who live close by, walk to some activity, walk to work, and so on) than the industrialized slums of England, where, at least, you were confined to a smaller, if more disgusting, area ("I met my love by the gas-works wall).

But getting rid of zoning laws is not the answer. Houston, for example, is a city without zoning laws, and it has been liberated of none of the evils of Euclidean zoning. Rather, what we need is smart zoning, a movement that is gaining ground in some parts of the country and, more importantly, "mixed use" zoning; zoning where you are allowed to set up a pizza shop by your house and where you can even run a business a few streets down. The confluence of these elements will create a community that is at once more personal and more beautiful; one that feels less like machinery and more like an actual place. There are many words used to express the desire to create something like this in the modern vocabulary -from "small town community" to "downtown-feel" to "pedestrian-friendly." Wherever these terms crop up, they should be encouraged as signs of a move away from the utilitarian suburbs to actual places.

On another subject, here is an excellent modern Iranian poem that came via Twitter and is now on Youtube.



I do not mean to sound pretentious, but the mix of new and traditional forms (video/poetry/Twitter) raises some interesting possibilities. As new forms of expression arise through technology, artists must "deal" with them somehow, and find ways of improving or at least establishing narrative through the use of non-traditional forms. We can easily all write historical fiction in archaic prose, but the problem is that when the "archaic" fiction was written, it was modern, not archaic, and it was usually on the "innovative" side of its tradition, working in a tradition but not simply repeating what had already been done. Which is why I believe that art in the digital age will have to find ways of incorporating digital reality -Internet communication, phone conversations, television, and so on- into the narrative. This his opens up both new avenues and potential pitfalls for the artist -new avenues if he is successful, pitfalls if uses modernity as an excuse for poor quality of work.

Here is a lighthearted example of a "successful" attempt at what I mean about new methods of narrative.

As always, feel free to comment.

Yours, &c,
Maro