Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are an emerging field, whereby vehicle-to-vehicle communications can enable many new applications such as safety and entertainment services. Most VANET applications are enabled by different routing protocols. The design of such routing protocols, however, is quite challenging due to the dynamic nature of nodes (vehicles) in VANETs. To exploit the unique characteristics of VANET nodes, we design a moving-zone based architecture in which vehicles collaborate with one another to form dynamic moving zones so as to facilitate information dissemination. We propose a novel approach that introduces moving object modeling and indexing techniques from the theory of large moving object databases into the design of VANET routing protocols. The results of extensive simulation studies carried out on real road maps demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared with both clustering and non-clustering based routing protocols.