Different Ideas of the City: Origins of Metropolitan Land-Use Regimes in the United States, Germany, and Switzerland

Abstract

This Note argues that national regimes of land-use regulation-the whole body of a country's institutions, laws, and jurisprudence that regulates building and development-can be understood only in the context of distinct political and legal regimes. National land-use regimes do not arise in response to universal laws of the market that exert the same influence at any location on the planet. Rather, land-use regimes differ from country to country. They are embedded in a complex, historically developing framework of ideology, law, and culture. If land-use controls regulate the physical shape of the communities we live in, then it is history itself that regulates what kind of community we view as wholesome, normal, and desirable-our ideas of what "the city" and "the good city" mean.