Software Use Zoning

Jane Jacobs criticizes “use zoning,” or the separating of different uses of a city into geographically distinct areas. She criticized how categories of use were defined, and how requirements were made by the authorities that only certain categories be allowed in a particular area. She writes the following, regarding a particular street in Greenwich Village, zoned “residential,” where a local bakery had “grown vigorously into a substantial wholesaler” and thus had to apply for “zoning exemption” to expand.

As city commercial zoning has become more “progressive” (i.e., imitative of suburban conditions) it has begun to emphasize distinctions between “local convenience shops,” “district shopping,” and the like. [...] But how do you classify such a street as this one with the bakery? It combines the most purely localized conveniences (like the laundry and the candy store) with district-wide attractions (like the cabinetmaker, the picture framer, the coffee house) and with city-wide attractions (like the theater, the art galleries, the poster shop). Its mixture is unique, but the pattern of unclassifiable diversity which it represents is not in the least unique. All lively, diversified city areas, full of vitality and surprises, exist in another world from that of suburban commerce.¹

She labels the ruling approach to city planning, the aim of her criticism, “Radiant Garden City,” after Le Corbusier’s ideas about the Radiant City (Ville Radieuse) and Ebenzer Howard’s about the Garden City.

The architecture of the City Beautiful centers went out of style. But the idea behind the centers was not questioned, and it has never had more force than it does today. The idea of sorting out certain cultural or public functions and decontaminating their relationship with the workaday city dovetailed nicely with the Garden City teachings. The conceptions have harmoniously merged, such as the Garden City and the Radiant City merged, into a sort of Radiant Garden City Beautiful, such as the immense Lincoln Square project for New York, in which a monumental City Beautiful cultural center is one among a series of adjoining Radiant City and Radiant Garden City housing, shopping and campus centers.^>2

I am believer in Jane Jacobs’s ideas that it’s not a unified field). And I have tried to find opportunities to draw parallels between this and software design. But I’m beginning to think that the people Jacobs criticizes—Le Corbusier, Ebenezer Howard, Lewis Mumford, etc.—might have more to say about software. Good software design is about “use zoning,” about factoring things into different modules (subsystems, objects, methods) depending on function—but also use, as the services a module offers is determined by which services others want to use.

¹ Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

² Ibid.