Zoning is one of the more mundane -- and potentially nefarious -- aspects of modern living. Bureaucratic at its core, at times inscrutable for the average person, it can make or break a city. It can also ruin a neighborhood, encourage new business, or protect natural resources. Brown uses examples of zoning, good and bad, to illustrate her points, though I wish she had included more ways to create protective ordinances.

The passage about improving a street by reintroducing cars was surprising, while the author suggesting a roll back of First Amendment jurisprudence was alarming.

Key to the City is a discussion of zoning in the united states and how it affects daily life. The book uses a case study approach of telling the stories of different cities and towns in the U.S. and how choices about zoning have changed those cities, earlier on for the worse, but now for the better, mostly.

The book has a good approach to the problems created by zoning, specifically treating the topic as bigger than zoning. There is the more typical discussion of car infrastructure, but the book also looks at food, industry, nightlife, and building codes or land use more generally. The author is skilled at breaking down the minutia and explaining it for a general audience. The discussions are broad in scope throughout the United States, and address rural areas, even if Hartford, CT is the song's refrain of where the author was on the planning committee.

It is also NIMBY-lite. Acknowledging the problems that arose out of zoning policy arising from the Supreme Court decision in Euclid, including the bigoted portions of the decision itself, the author is interested in reform, not revolution. Some of it seems reasonable, making moderate improvements where the perfect is not the enemy of the good. Some of it seems wackadoodle, drawn from a technocratic satire: the 15 minute city They warned you about. This sometimes reaches the point where the book contradicts itself, where the spirit of the law trumping the letter leads to takes that I can square, but with effort.

There are a lot of personal asides that are vaguely objectionable. The afterward thanks the editor for making the book less wonkish, but I think that they ought to have zagged, using the author's adroit technical writing to educate rather than feeling the need to humanize. It is not offensive (contra another reviewer on Swift; my specific complaints are more blog grade), but it is unpersuasive. It does nothing for the author's thesis. At worst, it is repeating the old mistakes in a new way. But it is this quality that makes the book worth recommending.

Standard urbanist discourse falls into two camps, Libertarian and Progressive. The book comes from more of a centrist position with a small c-conservative streak: civil rights are good; now please go mow your lawn. This is a sort of identity that tends to get flack from both Right and Left (mostly Left). It is core, or adjacent to, opposition to urbanist policies. So, if the worst possible case is that this is old wine in new bottles, the best possible one is that this is a sort of manifesto for a non-traditional set of urbanists, expressing its own set of concerns. That is forward motion, and what productive political argument looks like. It is helpful.

Thus, this is one of those "if you read one book on the topic" books. It is not comprehensive, but if you are the sort of person who is otherwise disinterested in the concept of regulation creating policy, it may help you see what us wonks are wonking over.

My thanks to the author, Sara C. Bronin, for writing the book, and to the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, for making the ARC available to me.

This is a really excellent primer on urban planning and design, even for people who have no background in it. Bronin uses case studies to demonstrate how zoning laws can create a unique and pleasant urban landscape or a dangerous and unpleasant one. She also explains various urban planning concepts such as Jane Jacobs’ “eyes on the street” and planning to accommodate pedestrians first and cars last. Highly recommend, especially for someone who wants to learn more about urban planning and doesn’t know where to start.

Taylor Swift != "Modern Day Elvis Presley"! I came into this book wanting to read about the American Government on the Fourth of July. Honestly, as an avowed Anarchist and former Libertarian Party official at both the State and local levels + 2x rural small town City Council candidate... I probably should have known better. ;)

It isn't that this book isn't illuminating nor well documented - it actually is reasonably good at both, with a bibliography clocking in at 21% of the overall text. Seriously, if you've never considered the topic of land zoning as it is practiced in the United States and how it is used to control you, your neighbors, your town, even to a slightly lesser (direct) manner your State and even the entire Country... you need to read this book.

Bronin truly does a great job of examining the history of zoning as practiced in the US, including how it came to be and why and how it has been used over the century or so since it first came into being. (Indeed, according to Bronin, the Supreme Court cases that effectively legalized the practice are still not quite a century old at either the writing of this review in early July 2024 or when the book is scheduled to be released in early October 2024.)

My issue, and I think it is objective enough (if, perhaps, barely) is that Bronin approaches this topic as a Chair of a Zoning Board who wants Zoning Boards to be even *more* active in limiting what you can do with the property that you legally own and actively encourages strategies to accomplish a very progressive agenda, including "Climate change" and mass transit theories that barely work in the extremely densely populated "Boshwash" (Boston - Washington DC) corridor she rules the aforementioned Zoning Board in - theories that could never work in the *far* less densely populated areas of South Georgia or even Central South Carolina that I've lived in, much less west of the Missisippi River where population densities (until you get to the Pacific Coast) largely truly plummet. And yes, there are *reasons* I mentioned my political background up front in this review. :)

As but an example, I point to the title of this review - at one point in this text, Ms. Bronin does in fact claim that Taylor Swift is a "modern day Elvis Presley". To be clear, if she had compared Ms. Swift to say the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or even Johnny Cash himself, that would have been a fair comparison and I would have had to find another example of where she is particularly outlandish without going into the actual details of the book (ie, spoilers). But as Ms. Swift never had to so much as register for the Draft - much less be selected by it and forced to serve in the US Military, this alone shows that Elvis was a different breed entirely. And to be clear, lest any Swifties attack this review just because of this paragraph, I'm not actually criticizing Ms. Swift. She is indeed a global phenomenon and is clearly quite talented in her own right. I am not saying otherwise or taking anything from her. I'm simply noting that for all she has done and all the fans she has, Elvis was *still* on another level from her.

Overall, read this book. Seriously. You're going to learn a lot, no matter your own political leanings or how you feel about the sanctity of private property. But "if you feel as I feel" (to quote the always amazing V for Vendetta), know there will be many points you will want to defenestrate this book forthwith and from the highest available window. But unless you've had the experience of myself or Ms. Bronin or the admittedly *numerous* people like us who *have* actively dealt with zoning boards at some direct level before... you really are going to learn some things here. Clearly, even *I* learned a few things here myself, even *with* a few years of directly relevant experience.

Recommended.