Works of Artifice
Zoning and the Dead Hand of the Law
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A tree wants to grow. It burrows its roots into the earth and thrusts its branches toward the sky. Left alone, it grows to its natural height and form: tall, full, and wild. The art of bonsai is to turn a potential giant into something that can fit in a pot. It requires constant intervention. New growth must be clipped and pruned and cultivated into the desired form: “It is your nature to be small,” the gardener says. And so the tree becomes a work of stunted beauty. Were the tree left to grow wild once more, it would not find its basic nature anew. Shaped for so long by suppression, its growth would become weird, warped, and gnarled.
Zoning likewise turns our cities into works of artifice, stunting their natural growth in the name of a certain kind of beauty. Suppress organic growth long enough, and the pressure doesn’t dissipate, it shows up elsewhere: in skyrocketing prices, in stagnation, in people priced out or pushed out entirely.
Like the bonsai, zoning requires a constant gardener. The dead hand of the law divides the city into individual pots in which only certain things may grow. The city is a living thing, and yet we dwarf and bind and cripple it. When at last we break under the strain, and allow some new use or form or height, what emerges often looks strange or misshapen, not like what was there before, but not quite like a city either.
It is our nature to resist change. That’s human. But it’s also our nature to adapt to change. The dead hand of the law pats us on the back to tell us we shouldn’t have to.
The tension surfaced recently at Austin’s Zoning & Platting Commission.
