re: green zoning

... Trees — redwoods, live oaks or blossoming fruit trees — are usually considered sturdy citizens of the sun-swept peninsula south of San Francisco, not criminal elements. But under a 1978 state law protecting homeowners’ investment in rooftop solar panels, trees that impede solar panels’ access to the sun can be deemed a nuisance and their owners fined up to $1,000 a day. The Solar Shade Act was a curiosity until late last year, when a dispute over the eight redwoods(a k a Tree No. 1, Tree No. 2, Tree No. 3, etc.) ended up in Santa Clara County criminal court....


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/07/science/earth/07redwood.html?ref=us

Parametric Zoning Manifesto

The existing practice of city-wide zoning (originated in New York City in 1916 and exported around the world (witness the tower-on-a-base typology even in Dubai)) attempts to define architectural potential as a set of static parts - modular components. Rather than satisfying a range of possible conditions, the collection of zones repeatedly fails to produce the effects prioritized, even as new zones are generated. The ubiquity of the "special" portends this failure as zones lose any universal ability and become merely a lowest common denominator from which specialization can occur.

This ongoing project seeks to design zoning mechanisms capable of generating all prioritized effects. Success is satisfied when the zone is capable of generating its own specificity. To accomplish this, the strategy of parametrics is deployed. The field of possibility is dynamic - the logic of the system develops recursively. Feedback loops and corruption become part of the system, not foreign to it.