Discuss Real Life Architecture, Structure And Sociology

Nice article kipate! I must confess I don't like any of the grids, but that's just my opinion. Of course it's a rather easy way to build a city, so that's why I really don't like grid cities in CXL . A city should evolve, so to me, a grid layout is a sign the city has been built in a couple of minutes. Get yourself a piece of paper, a pencil and a ruler and draw some lines on it, no creativity needed.
But yes, it is the most practical. A sedan is practical too, but I'd rather get myself a space shuttle or a tank (okay, a sports car will do). Practicality isn't always good. Or practical, like in Baldwin Street...

 

Great topic idea, kipate. It's really at the heart of many city planning debates. Hope I didn't get too carried away here.

Cities across the globe have been laid out on a grid pattern since as early as 2600 BC (present-day Pakistan, Egypt). Even though nearly every reigning empire in antiquity built grid cities, they are most often associated with the Greeks and Romans, because the Romans built a whole -Ism around the concept (Roman Urbanism).

In Europe, grid cities developed between the 12th and 16th centuries. Spain mandated them for all new colonies in the Americans in 1483, and by 1582, Philadelphia was planned out as the first major grid based city in the USA.

Why a grid?
For ancient and medieval times, a city built on a grid was easier to rule.
1. It's easier to count your stuff. "I own 100 [grid units] of stuff in Camelot, and 16 [grid units] of stuff in Timbuktu." I can tax Camelot how much more than Timbuktu?
2. It allows for standardization. Hippodamus, who devised the Greek grid system and who is often called the "father of urban planning," believed in allotting resources according to three classes of citizen, and dividing land into sacred, public and private spaces. All easier using grids.
3. You can use it to remind people that you are connected to God. In Many grid cities, beginning in pyramid based cities, a north-south axis from the royal palace and an east-west axis from the temple/church would meet at a central plaza where King and God merged and crossed.
4. A grid city is easier to defend. Grid cities don't just spring up at common crossroad like villages do. They are strategically placed to defend your kingdom. Based on Roman military camps, grid cities are square, with fortified barrier walls and two main streets that intersect in the middle of the city and divide the it into quadrants. There is a city gate at each end of both main streets, and guard tower(s) by each gate. You can control all access to your city. You hope.
5. Grid cities allows for rapid expansion. When you don't have to spend all you time counting, preserving and defending your territory, you have more time to go out and conquer the rest of the world. Or, in the American fashion, go west young man and purchase your new homestead that is all nicely plotted out on a geometrically based (grid) map.

There are modern day reasons to support a grid based city - like uniform building codes and straight sided houses with 90 degree angles, or consistent street numbering.

What killed the grid?
1. The automobile. The city grid was run over by a car.
When you are no longer concerned with defending them in hand-to-hand combat and are not reliant on public transportation, grid based cities are walking-person friendly, not driving-person friendly. A driver wants large superblocks with fewer continuous through streets that have more and faster car travel lanes. (I think the dynamics of CXL favor this type of city.)

In the 1920s - 1940s, owning a car in a developed country could get you out of the "cramped and cluttered" city to the freedom and prosperity promised by the suburbs. "Live on your own private cul-de-sac with easy access to the freeway!" To be fair, urban areas were often not only cramped and dirty but also disease and crime riddled.

2. Boredom. Most planned cities worldwide are grid based. Rather than developing gradually over a long period of time in sporadic jumps, street patterns are uniformly square or rectangular. Many grid based cities used to ignore local geographical highlights as well, dummying down the cityscape even more.

3. Technology. Buildings in grid based cities are located along the perimeter of a block, with entrances facing the street. This design was intended to provide good social interaction among people. That's face-to-face interaction, people.

CXL: my move back to the grid
I've been playing city building games since the original SimCity came out twenty-five years ago. Since then, I began working in urban transit management, and became interested in urban planning. Mixed use city planning, Livable Cities, Sustainable Neighborhoods - these are concepts that are important to me. So I've gotten back to using some grids in my CXL cities.

I used to layout every single road by hand. Now I like a mix of free-flowing streets in hilly and/or suburban areas, and a variety of grid configurations in urban areas. That seems the most realistic and challenging to me at the moment. Good urban is hard to create. You can look at a CXL city and tell if it's based on just dropping grids. There will be a whopping traffic nightmare, for one thing. I fit any grid shapes I use to my master road plan, and place the new building grouped how I want. You can tell the difference. For Harriet Island, I built large apartment complexes using identical buildings, because that fit the storyline. And although some people have said otherwise, I really like how it looks. And it was more complicated than I had thought it would be to make it actually work.

resources:
http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog.php#.VCndjmd0yc9; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_plan; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_the_Indies;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippodamus_of_Miletus; http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/building/townplanning.html; http://globalmoxie.com/blog/nyc-grid-design.shtml; http://www.thegreatamericangrid.com/archives/777

 

i think you'll find this interesting.

there was an international competition to design Canberra, the capital of Australia. the winner was an american team, Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahony Griffin.

this is the final version of their winning design:



Lake Burley Griffin (as it was named) was created by damming the Molonglo River. you might want to have a google to see what other designers did with the river

what's interesting is the blend of grids and circles. the city was actually designed around axes and vistas:



some, but not all, of Griffin's vision is still visible today:



(incidentally, the Black Mountain telecoms tower is where the 'i' is in this photo, at the top left)

the funny thing is that people who are not from Canberra HATE driving there! 'It's all circles! You don't know where you are!' i think it's probably easier to retain a sense of direction in a grid i.e. ' i turned left, so now i'm heading west'.

 

I lived in a suburb of Canberra in the 1970s (I was still in primary school, just in case you're wondering!) Many suburbs that were on the outskirts in the 1970s had a conformity to them but avoided using a strict grid pattern as the main layout (and they had other variations to take terrain features into account). They still followed a circular overall pattern but they weren't as strict as the CBD/government district in this.

Many people want some sort of order when they move about and a grid pattern makes them feel as though a logical progression is happening and it also makes transport easier. But... people also like some beauty in their vistas and a grid pattern just appears as completely artificial and doesn't suit that desire. There's no doubt that a grid pattern is more efficient (if there aren't major deviations needed to account for terrain) but it isn't the most pleasing. For example, I find central areas of New York City to be quite ugly, they just look like row after row of slab sided buildings - the phrase "concrete canyons" seems to have been invented for New York.

 

Yeah, that is interesting. Let's see, two American architects designed the Australian capital city, using a design concept based on the British urban planning method called the garden city movement, which was itself based on literary works about Utopia, written by two different Americans. You Aussies are fearless.

And Canberra looks really cool, too.

 

to be fair to the Griffins and canberra's planners since, Capital Hill was to be the site of Parliament.



that's the temporary Parliament House down the hill. temporary, of course, means 1927 - 1988. i think it's neat that the prizewinning competition design (yes, an american won this one too) involved lopping the top off the hill and recreating it in the shape of the building. the principle was that the citizens would be able to walk over, and be higher than, the politicians.

 

While Canberra might seem underpopulated when compared to European or North American cities, it isn't underpopulated by Australian standards. You have to take into account that Australia has a total population of just over 23 million in 2014.
We only reached 20 million in December of 2003.
There are states in European countries and in the USA that have more people than the total population of Australia.

Our cities would be large towns by European standards but the other thing to take into account is that we have a lot more land for the population size. We don't have to have compact towns/cities and so we can have them spread out without worry about using up land needed for agriculture or industry and so on.

For us, the distance between one town and another might be 30km or it might be 300km. For example, I used to live in the mining town of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. One of my friends lived in another mining town (Mount Magnet). The nearest town to Kalgoorlie was about 40km away while the nearest town to Mt Magnet was about 70km away.

Once a month we would both travel to Perth for a weekend of pubs, clubs and movies.
Kalgoorlie is about 600km from Perth while Mt Magnet is about 580km so we travelled about 1200km just for a weekend in the city.
By train, the trip from Kalgoorlie to Perth was about eight hours.
By comparison, the first time I was in the UK, I spent two and half hours on a train from London and in that time travelled a third of the length of the entire nation.

 

If I ever get back to Australia, I am definitely going to visit Canberra! Are there buildings standing empty and city decay, or is it just a spacious city? Hope I get to see it one day.

Kevin - I totally relate to what you're saying. Just think, with another couple hours in transit, you could have been in a completely different country. Talk about a weekend get-away. I don't think anyone in the world is as lucky as people who get to travel.

After a summer backpacking around Europe as a student, I came home to the American Midwest. More than anything else, I was struck by the how incredibly vast and unruly the countryside seemed. I can remember thinking I finally understood why some Americans are loud, obnoxious travelers... barely out of diapers, culturally.

That fall I moved to Minneapolis. I lived in a studio apartment in an old Victorian mansion, right on Loving Hill. Another new sense of space developed.

All this just to say that one's sense of space is relative, I guess. As in, maybe my diverse background is why I like a mix-up in my CLX cities.

 

Excellent.

 

You're right, the discussion of Canberra would be better done in a separate thread but I would like to mention one other thing that makes Canberra the way it is.
It's a specialized city, a large portion of it's population is involved with government or the bureaucracy and they want their own cars, they don't want to travel on buses or trains - these people believe that public transport is for poor people!

 

sorry, i did think maybe i was threadjacking. didn't mean to

 

it's very spacious. spacious almost to the point of feeling empty.

 

yeah, it's ridiculous. they're only just now talking about bringing in trams which is a perfect solution for canberra as a lot of the roads are very wide.

 

another australian example (which i hope takes us back to the topic) is adelaide:



you might agree that this is an excellent way of maintaining a grid but making it more interesting. i really can't think of a more effective way of planning a city than to use grids.

 

Yeah I tend to agree, grids are a more efficient way of laying out a city but you can break those grids up by placing them as blocks at different angles to each other (with the spaces inbetween filled with other features or parkland and so on) to make the city seem less linear. Or even having clusters of grids separated by large parklands, natural features and so on.