Land Use Proximity in United States Urban Landscapes

E. Anthon Eff

Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN

• Why no pawn shops in shopping malls?

• No liquor stores near churches?

• No adult bookstores near schools?

• No nursing homes near cemeteries?

Tacit rules of land use proximity– Avoiding contagion of unlike things– Can be studied from the perspective of

Anthropology: formation of taboos

• Unconscious preferences Tacit rules Collective action Landuse regulations Landuse associations.

• Empirical look at landuse associations can give sense of these unconscious preferences.

• Data: all parcels in Davidson County, Tennessee (Nashville); 216,898 parcels, classified in 77 landuses.

• Calculate the probability that one land use will be adjacent to another.– Adjacent: two parcels adjacent when borders

within 70 feet of each other.– 216,898 parcels related in 2,397,367

proximate parcel pairs.

Example of parcel proximity relationships

matrix M: each cell mij gives the number of times that a parcel of land use i is proximate to a parcel of land use j. (M is 77x77, only eight rows and columns shown)

landuse description ADS AH AL AO ARBS BC BFI CAADS Auto Dealer - Sales 307 2 13 3 190 85 49 0AH Apartment High-rise 2 2 28 6 1 0 1 2AL Apartment Low-rise 13 28 2,586 46 36 5 7 184AO Apartment walkup 3 6 46 242 3 0 0 25ARBS Auto Repair and Body Shop 190 1 36 3 281 10 41 19BC Business Center 85 0 5 0 10 128 5 0BFI Branch Financial Institution 49 1 7 0 41 5 56 4CA Common Area 0 2 184 25 19 0 4 36,518

Matrix M can be used to create the transition matrix P, where each cell pij gives the probability that a parcel of land use i is proximate to a parcel of land use j.

jij

ijij m

mp

(Eight of 77 rows and columns shown)

landuse description ADS AH AL AO ARBS BC BFI CAADS Auto Dealer - Sales 0.09011 0.00059 0.00382 0.00088 0.05577 0.02495 0.01438 0.00000AH Apartment High-rise 0.00200 0.00200 0.02806 0.00601 0.00100 0.00000 0.00100 0.00200AL Apartment Low-rise 0.00087 0.00187 0.17247 0.00307 0.00240 0.00033 0.00047 0.01227AO Apartment walkup 0.00256 0.00512 0.03925 0.20648 0.00256 0.00000 0.00000 0.02133ARBS Auto Repair and Body Shop 0.04131 0.00022 0.00783 0.00065 0.06110 0.00217 0.00891 0.00413BC Business Center 0.05359 0.00000 0.00315 0.00000 0.00631 0.08071 0.00315 0.00000BFI Branch Financial Institution 0.02139 0.00044 0.00306 0.00000 0.01790 0.00218 0.02444 0.00175CA Common Area 0.00000 0.00004 0.00332 0.00045 0.00034 0.00000 0.00007 0.65912

matrix X: each cell xij gives the expected probability that a parcel of land use i is proximate to a parcel of land use j.

i jij

iij

ijij m

mpEx

The expected proximity matrix X can then be compared with the actual proximity matrix P to give matrix D:

D = P - X

Net Probability: D = P - X

(Eight of 77 rows and columns shown)

These net probabilities represent the tacit rules governing land use associations.

landuse description ADS AH AL AO ARBS BC BFI CAADS Auto Dealer - Sales 0.08868 0.00017 -0.00249 0.00039 0.05383 0.02428 0.01342 -0.02329AH Apartment High-rise 0.00057 0.00158 0.02175 0.00552 -0.00093 -0.00067 0.00004 -0.02129AL Apartment Low-rise -0.00057 0.00145 0.16617 0.00258 0.00047 -0.00033 -0.00050 -0.01102AO Apartment walkup 0.00113 0.00470 0.03295 0.20599 0.00063 -0.00067 -0.00096 -0.00196ARBS Auto Repair and Body Shop 0.03988 -0.00020 0.00152 0.00016 0.05917 0.00151 0.00795 -0.01916BC Business Center 0.05216 -0.00042 -0.00315 -0.00049 0.00437 0.08004 0.00219 -0.02329BFI Branch Financial Institution 0.01996 0.00002 -0.00325 -0.00049 0.01596 0.00152 0.02348 -0.02155CA Common Area -0.00143 -0.00038 -0.00298 -0.00004 -0.00159 -0.00067 -0.00089 0.63583

landuse description freq. in pairs

no. of parcels

as pct. of all parcels

net prob. self-proximity

openness lowest net prob.

highest net prob.

SFDPP Single Family Dwelling Per Parcel 1,017,839 132,670 61.167 0.3741 -0.25249 RESCU SFDPPRESCU Residential Condominium Unit 295,806 19,272 8.885 0.6426 -0.09271 SFDPP RESCUVRESL Vacant Residential Land 212,654 14,220 6.556 0.2891 -0.0236 SFDPP VRESLXXX Unknown (always open land) 252,510 3,620 1.669 0.3527 -0.02056 SFDPP XXXSFD Single Family Dwelling 118,039 6,580 3.034 0.4551 -0.01068 SFDPP SFDCA Common Area 55,564 6,155 2.838 0.6404 -0.00866 SFDPP CAD Duplex 70,939 9,426 4.346 0.2176 -0.00722 RESCU D

Omitting 63 land uses in the middleTOHDW Terminal or Heavy Duty Warehouse 10,819 690 0.318 0.1343 0.01608 SFDPP TOHDWSSO Strip Shopping (no major tenants) 6,134 560 0.258 0.0926 0.01903 SFDPP OSGRSOSGRS One Story General Retail Store 10,193 878 0.405 0.2123 0.02061 SFDPP OSGRSVIL Vacant Industrial Land 14,447 689 0.318 0.2526 0.02212 SFDPP VILOBNML Office Building (Non-Medical Low-rise) 15,636 1,766 0.814 0.1586 0.02601 SFDPP OBNMLPL Parking Lot 11,847 1,441 0.664 0.2078 0.02814 SFDPP PLVCL Vacant Commercial Land 36,751 3,219 1.484 0.2441 0.05106 SFDPP VCL

From Table 1: 7 landuses with highest openness (all commercial or industrial) and 7 landuses with lowest openness (all respectable housing or common area)

Block Modeled Graph

Summary of tacit rules:

• Single family home on city lot is most isolated from other land uses.

• Residential is isolated from commercial.

• Lower-status housing (apartments, mobile homes) tends to be more associated with commercial or rural land uses.

Historical background I

• 18th century Europe, emerging capitalist middle class, erosion of traditions (Möser, Simmel)

• Old elite displaced (e.g., guild masters lose market to factory owners). Circulation of the elite (Pareto). The need to display status (Eric Wolf).

• Work areas move out of home to different part of city (Braudel); principle of conspicuous leisure (Veblen).

• Home separates into public and private areas, with public area full of expensive goods for display (Braudel); principle of conspicuous consumption (Veblen).

Historical background II

• Pecuniary valuations displace traditional values (things and people become “commodified”). (Georg Simmel)

• “Whole person” relationships replaced by instrumental, contractually bounded relationships (e.g., serfs replaced by wage labor). (Justus Möser)

• 19th century Europe, middle class cult of the family (“domestic ideology”), centered on home, provides new source of meaning (Frykman & Löfgren)

• Separation of home into private and public areas. Family sheltered from commodified relationships.

Summary:

• Most salient separation is between single family home on city lot and commercial landuses.

• This separation based on – the use of the home as a signal of status,

removing from the home all trace of useful work.– the “domestic ideology”: family as the focus of

life, separated from external world

Implications

• New way to view landuse regulations: they function as sumptuary laws maintaining status boundary.

• The trend toward housing separated from other land uses has deep historical and behavioral roots. Not easy to change.