zoning

Eventually, however, we discovered that some uses weren’t all that appropriate next to each other. Do we really want kids going to school across the street from a factory belching out black coal smoke? So the idea of zoning was invented to separate land uses into different geographic zones in the city: housing goes over here, offices go over there, and factories go way over there. By the 1950s, this idea had become immensely popular and virtually every city in America was growing with all of its different uses segregated into different zones.