Using GIS to understand the socially undesirable outcomes of unregulated land-use in mid-19th century New York City

Gregory Baics and Leah Meisterlin, "Zoning Before Zoning: Land Use and Density in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York City," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 106 (2016): 5

The take-away: Taking a historical approach to land use, Baics and Meisterlin use advanced GIS methods to assess the spatial order of New York City in the mid-nineteenth century, a time when land-use systems were largely governed by market forces, not regulated by city governments. The authors emphasize the socially undesirable outcomes to which unregulated markets led.

Abstract

Not until the beginning of the twentieth century did U.S. city governments turn to comprehensive zoning to gain control of their land use and built environment. Nineteenth-century cities had comparatively unregulated land-use systems, where proprietors and builders found minimal restrictions to their choices to develop urban land. This article exploits newly digitized geographic information systems (GIS) data, at the level of building footprints, made available by the New York Public Library, to study the land-use geography of mid-nineteenth-century Manhattan, the Western world's then third largest city. We ask: What was the spatial order of the nineteenth-century city? Beyond the case, what can we learn about land use in a political economy where market forces operated with much greater freedom? Addressing these issues, we introduce a variety of advanced GIS methods to the original data set. Specifically, we examine the separation and mixing of the three basic land-use types of commerce, industry, and residence, by the spatial units of both blocks and streets. In addition, we measure at a new level of precision the enormous variations in residential density and crowding that defined the growing sociospatial inequalities of nineteenth-century cities. Documenting systematically and in detail these spatial patterns, including their socially undesirable outcomes, helps understand how nineteenth-century cities developed and the conditions they produced to warrant increasing land-use controls, from building codes to government-mandated zoning. 

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