You can tell a lot about the future of a metro area based on how it deals with tensions over plans to develop its land. Zoning laws, which help determine everything from building heights to building and land values, set a course not only for a city's development but its character and attitude, too.

These days, the Puget Sound region (primarily Seattle) is embroiled in a battle between real-estate developers and labor leaders over how much industrial land in the region should remain industrial.

One side says Puget Sound is, in many ways, shedding its industrial image and embracing a high-tech, service-worker future. As a result, it needs to open some industrial land to higher and better uses in the form of mixed-use residential, office and retail buildings. The other side says, no, the industrial land needs to stay industrial because not only does it harbor good-paying jobs but it also retains a piece of our blue-collar character, a piece worth saving.

Here is where the battle was at when I last checked: Mayor Greg Nickels proposed protecting jobs by reducing office and retail development on 5,000 acres in the city dedicated mostly to manufacturing and industry. Here is what Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis told the Seattle Times: "This is kind of shaping up as a battle for the fate of industrial jobs in the city. It's downtown versus industry, white collar versus blue."

Or not. At the risk of sounding naive, I would suggest that perhaps this isn't an us or them, "versus" situation necessarily. I would suggest this after reading about what is happening in Los Angeles, which also is embroiled in a zoning war over the fate of industrial land.

Although the tensions are just as high in LA as they are here, several developers quoted in the LA Times story suggest a compromise can be found at least among some competing land uses.

One of the developers is Kate Bartolo, senior vice president of development for the Kor Group, which is developing a number of projects downtown, including t he conversion of warehouses in LA's industrial district into condos and retail space. Here is what she said: "Saying that industrial is wholly incompatible with live-work lofts is very dated thinking."

Perhaps the correct approach here would be to find the points where the supposedly competing land uses are actually not all that much in competition. Certainly, some buildings don't belong next to each other, and it's important to promote good-paying industrial jobs. But, when it comes to zoning and land uses, the future of cities doesn't rest on an either/or mentality. Cities aren't like that. They're messy and, as such, they should be roomy enough for urban office workers and loft-dwellers as well as manufacturers and the people they employ.

To those ends, perhaps "form-based codes," which are more specific than traditional zoning laws, might help lay out how different buildings and their occupants interact with one another. Or, perhaps, "transitional zones" which reflect the different contours of different pieces of land, are a way to enable a place to evolve smartly from industrial to retail to residential while maintaining these important uses.