Zoning is a remedial technique which has been introduced in the city for regulating unrestricted development. With rapid industrialization, what was happening in the cities was that factories were encroaching upon residential areas, skyscrapers overshadowed other buildings.

Historically, the first steps in the direction of modern city planning can be traced to practices establishing districts within which certain rights of citizens were legally curbed. During the late middle ages, in Europe slaughterhouses were located on the outskirts of town so that offensive odors would not permeate the city.

During the 1700s, in Boston the segregation of the storage place for gunpowder away from the city centre was one of the first recorded acts of zoning the separation of social functions in separate land use districts. Activities that were public nuisance or menace were located in a less crowded area.