Zoning Against the Grain: People’s Architecture and the Renegotiation of the Urban Commons

This paper critically examines a group called “People’s Architecture” who operated in Berkeley, California between 1969 and 1973 and whose work particularly addressed the micro-zoning scale of the residential urban block. Berkeley in the late 1960s still retained a fairly conventional set of zoning codes, and its master plan had been continually revised through urban renewal and campus expansion plans by the nearby University of California. Resistance against these plans had culminated in the seizure of a University lot for the construction of a 'People’s Park.' It was the claiming of this commons that fueled the formation of radical groups, including People's Architecture, who hoped to rethink the entire basis of municipal land division and governance. Zoning, for these groups, addressed not only the outward forms of building envelopes and ‘open spaces’ but also the most intimate relations between bodies and things, between public and private. By the spring of 1970, People’s Architecture and their collaborators had devised a complete program for the radical collectivization of urban land. In erasing the zoning distinctions between domestic dwelling and public right-of-way, streets began to lose their strictly separate boundaries and functional uniformities. Houses and apartment buildings became connected by bridges while individual lots merged into a series of parks, vegetable gardens, and footpaths. The significance of these proposals and their remaining legacies, I argue, lay in their concrete attempt to dissolve and reorder what Henri Lefebvre called 'abstract space,' particularly the commodified form of urbanization which modern zoning essentially ratified and enabled.