Zoning, zooning

Urban planning must return to reflecting on its structural roots and the founding acts related to the functional, social and symbolic organisation of the territory. Territoriality is the result of an inevitable act of separation and exclusion, as much at the geographical scale as at the scale of local interventions and urban planning. Power, in its institutionalised forms, is expressed though the definition of borders. Zoning must be inserted within this mesh. As a result it cannot be reduced to a banal technique, or a reductive practice of simplification. Instead, it must reacquire a sense of responsibility, using the boundary to rediscover the purpose of the sign.