zoning

1. 1
   noununcountable

   Legislative action that regulates how property may be used and what buildings may be constructed within an area under a government's jurisdiction.

   Like a rulebook that decides, block by block, what each piece of land is allowed to become.

   The city council updated its zoning to permit mixed-use development downtown.

   Residents challenged the new zoning at a public hearing.

   Note

   Law treats it as a map with rules attached. A jurisdiction is divided into districts, and each gets its own permitted uses, building dimensions and density. The word most often works as a modifier, as in zoning policy or zoning law, and its reach can extend into the air. Oliver Wainwright, writing in 2019 on super-tall towers, credits a zoning policy that lets developers acquire unused airspace nearby and add it to their own lot.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of zone.

   The council is zoning the waterfront for commercial use.

   Planners are zoning the hillside to limit how tall buildings can be.

   Note

   The same -ing form does two jobs: the progressive verb (the council is zoning the waterfront) and the gerund naming the act (zoning the hillside took a year). It carries every sense of zone, and the object tells them apart. The planning senses are transitive and need one. The slang "daydreaming" sense takes none. As a gerund it shades into the land-use noun, which can take a plural, zonings.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The practice of dividing a service or network into zones, as with the fare zones used in public transit.

   The transit authority's zoning sets ticket prices according to how far passengers travel.

   Under the subway's zoning, a ride into the central area costs more than a trip between two suburbs.

   Note

   Transport has its own zoning, unrelated to land law: a network is cut into bands, and fares follow the bands a passenger crosses. Andrew Martin's Underground Overground: A Passenger's History of the Tube (2012) links the Tube's zones to its ticket barriers of 1987, because zone-based fares kept the gate software simple. Context separates it from the land-use sense: a ticket points here, a building permit there.

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