The suburban curse of the zoning zombies!

There is a profound question that occasionally occurs to me while walking to buy bread, not metaphorical bread or lifestyle bread, but actual warm edible bread within five minutes of the front gates of Larga Towers, bought with small change and carried home in a paper bag that fogs gently from the steam, and the question becomes sharper when I notice that many apartment buildings in Cuenca, including some of the taller ones, have a pharmacy, a small restaurant, and a mini market, or something similar at ground level, so that if you live upstairs and it is pouring with rain and you need a loaf of bread, a bottle of beer, or an aspirin, you can solve the problem without an umbrella, a car, or a strategic plan.

It is this: How did the United States, a country that once produced corner shops, streetcars named Desire, diners, and main streets across a continent, come to organise itself so that millions of people now live in neighbourhoods where the nearest rotisserie chicken is three miles away and reachable only by automobile, and why did nobody ever appear to vote explicitly for this arrangement, given that there was no great national referendum asking whether Americans wished to live in tracts that contained only houses. surrounded by parking, connected by freeways, and dependent on vehicles for basic shopping.

Yet this is what happened, while here in Cuenca I can walk past a pharmacy, two bakeries, a hardware shop, a dentist, three tiendas, and a man selling avocados from a plastic crate before I reach the river, without consulting a zoning map, attending a committee meeting, or encountering an urban planner, because this is simply how the city works.

The American story begins, oddly enough, with good intentions, because in the 1920s US courts decided that cities were allowed to separate land into zones, housing here, shops there, factories somewhere else, which at the time seemed tidy and rational, rather like filing cabinets for human activity, and then in the 1930s and 40s the federal government began backing home loans, but only in places that followed “good planning practices,” meaning low density, single family houses, no nearby shops, and no mixing of uses.

Banks followed these rules, developers followed the banks, and cities followed the developers, not because anyone was philosophically committed to sprawl, but because this was where financing and approvals were available, so nobody planned sprawl so much as paid for it through policy and incentives.

After World War II, the conditions were ideal for this system to expand rapidly, because the United States emerged with its infrastructure undamaged, with a booming economy, rising incomes, cheap energy, and enormous amounts of not particularly fertile undeveloped land, especially in wide open scrubland states such as Florida, Texas, and Arizona, where cities could expand almost without physical constraint.

At the same time, Washington began paying for interstate highways, often covering ninety percent of the cost, and states would have been foolish not to build them, so they did, everywhere, linking suburbs to cities and cities to each other with ribbons of concrete that made long-distance driving fast, predictable, and socially normal, turning these roads into the spine of a national development strategy rather than mere transport infrastructure.

They made it easy to live far away, sensible to build far away, and profitable to spread out, while cities simultaneously began requiring parking for almost everything, so that shops, offices, apartments, and eventually whole districts were surrounded by land devoted to storing stationary motor vehicles.

Once zoning, mortgages, abundant land, interstate highways, and parking rules were combined, they formed a system that produced one dominant outcome, suburbia, and it operated automatically until entire lives, savings, and political identities became dependent on its continuation, making it extremely difficult to dismantle.

Britain took a different path after World War II by creating a planning system based on permits rather than maps, in which almost everything requires approval, neighbours can object, councils decide, historic character is protected, and green belts encircle cities, producing towns and countryside that are often attractive and carefully preserved.

This system, however, makes building homes extraordinarily difficult, because developers must buy land, spend money, hire professionals, commission surveys, and then, and only then ask permission, which means that only large companies can reliably absorb the risk, while small builders disappear, supply falls behind demand, and prices rise.

At the same time, many town centers in the UK have developed a parallel problem. High streets that once supported dense mixtures of shops, cafés, offices, and apartments are increasingly marked by boarded-up storefronts, short-term lets to pop-up stores, and charity shops, while access is policed by parking Nazis who make even a brief visit expensive, stressful, and unpredictable.

For people living in surrounding villages and countryside, a simple trip to a market town for lunch, shopping, or errands now risks fines, clamping, or complicated payment systems, so many simply stop coming, preferring out-of-town retail parks or staying at home, which further weakens town centres and accelerates decline.

The result is that Britain has managed, in many places, to combine strict development control with hollowed-out high streets, protecting buildings while losing everyday life, so that it did not sprawl in the American sense, but neither did it preserve vibrant urban centres, instead becoming rigid and resistant to change.

Cuenca followed neither path.

It never adopted American-style single use zoning, it never surrounded itself with an inviolable green belt, and it never turned planning into a permanent legal battlefield, but instead retained something closer to the old European and Latin American tradition of mixed use by default, control by context, and regulation focused on height, safety, heritage, and noise rather than on banning everyday activities.

This is why apartments sit above bakeries, clinics operate in former houses, soccer fields are next to hotels, workshops function behind homes, tiendas appear in living rooms, and offices occupy converted bedrooms, arrangements that would alarm a zoning lawyer but function perfectly well in practice.

The result is sometimes messy and not always beautiful, but it allows most people to live near sources of food, walk to daily necessities, and manage ordinary life without constant reliance on a car.

All three systems reflect their underlying politics.

America assumes that once rules are set, building should be easy, so political battles concentrate on zoning maps.

Britain assumes that every building must be justified politically, so conflict focuses on individual permissions.

Ecuador assumes that if rules are followed, approval is likely, so most energy is directed toward building rather than litigating.

Because construction is predictable, it continues, and the irony is that systems designed to be protective often produce the least housing, while systems designed to be market friendly often produce the least livable neighbourhoods.

Nobody deliberately set out to create food deserts, parking oceans, or three-mile walks to bananas, because people were voting instead for cheap loans, easy driving, protected views, and rising property values, with the long-term consequences arriving later in the form of higher costs, longer commutes, weaker communities, and a collective bill passed to future generations.

When I buy bread in Cuenca, I am not participating in a lifestyle trend or making a statement about urban theory, but benefiting from a planning system that never fully separated life into rigid compartments, with home in one place, work in another, food somewhere else, and cars everywhere in between.

Instead, life is allowed to overlap, and that, more than climate, cuisine, or cost of living, may be the real reason I find this place so comfortable, not because it is perfect, but because it still assumes, in a practical and largely untheorized way, that human beings should be able to forage for food on foot.