Toward abolition of R1 zoning and the two-egress straitjacket?

Can we change the rules to transform our communities?

This project will document popular perceptions of context-sensitive densification in the so-calle post-suburban ‘Yellow Belts’ of Toronto and Montréal, where struggles over innovative land practices continue apace (see Meslin; Bunce). We target two restrictive land practices common in Anglo-American contexts : (a) protectionist ‘R1’ zoning regimes that limit huge swaths of (sub)urban land to ‘single-family-detached’ housing typologies and (b) the two-means-of-egress requirement in building codes. Such regulatory measures are self-perpetuating structures of permanence, both material (in the built environment) and immaterial (in legal and regulatory frameworks) in nature. These have been challenged in many U.S. jurisdictions where R1 zoning has been banned, such as Minneapolis-St Paul (see notably Hoyt and Manville et al.). Such reform is possible only when broad (popular) political support can be empirically demonstrated. Indeed, many proponents of ‘gentle’ or ‘soft’ densification argue that participatory (crowdsourcing) processes of urban design and planning can lead to the meaningful reform of existing regulatory regimes when coupled with robust performative design guidelines.