Zones are key building blocks used for analysis and creating models (mental and statistical) of urban and environmental systems.
Used in a range of fields from biodiversity assessment to transport planning, spatially contiguous areal units break-up continuous space into discrete chunks.
Many methods rely on good zoning systems, including origin-destination analysis, geographically weighted regression, and choropleth visualisation.

Open access administrative boundaries are increasingly available through national databases and OpenStreetMap but are often inappropriate to geographic research, analysis and map making needs, being often: based on arbitrary factors; inconsistent between different cities/regions; and of highly variable sizes and shapes.

This talk outlines an approach to tackle these problems: tools that can auto-generate zones based on minimal input data.
We propose cross-platform and language agnostic implementations to enable a diverse range of people to generate bespoke zoning systems for their needs based on the understanding that accessibility, flexibility and extensibility are key to usability.
We also demonstrate working tools that take a step in this direction which at the time of writing include:

• a core library written in Rust with small and fast binaries available for all major operating systems
• an R package (published on the Comprehensive R Archive Network, CRAN) that also enables visualisation of zoning systems