Grid city, scalable city: Part 2, the ever-changing reality

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1. ]

Preserve your software; the rest is meat.

– Rudy Rucker

As we saw yesterday in Part 1, to grow, cities like other organisms need an overall plan, lest they simply sprawl into fat and globular congestion, and no plan offers better, simpler growth expandability than laying a grid, a lattice onto which the economy will grow, as celebrated by art critic Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times:

Riverside Drive and 94th Street, 1890

But that lattice is neither a coincidence nor a natural outgrowth of private investment. Rather, it develops best is the wise gardener of government extends its most beneficial powers – clear entitlement and an efficient grid – to create the enabling environment for capital and economic development.

We didn’t grow this way by accident

New York property values boomed thanks to the grid, which effectively created the real estate market.

As put by Solly Angel, the prophet of urbanization, cities flourish on an arterial grid of dirt roads.

The prophet of urbanization

Many cities in developing countries are still growing rapidly and are expected to double (or more than double) their populations and triple (or more than triple) their built-up areas in the next 25 years. Municipal officials in several intermediate cities in Ecuador, instigated by the author on an exploratory mission for the World Bank, have begun to develop a joint strategy for accommodating their expected population growth.

Gridding is a governmental function because it adjudicates the division between public land (for infrastructure) and private property (for development), whereas individual private-sector actors will maximize the value of their property, not necessarily the ecosystem’s. As government is the principal beneficiary of a healthy ecosystem, it is the natural investor in both physical and geographic/ political infrastructure.

The Brevoort Estate at 54th and 55th, 1866

It aims to attain four related objectives:

1. A planning objective: laying the foundations for an effective city planning regime.

2. A transport objective: introducing an arterial road network into expansion areas.

3. An anti-poverty objective: ensuring an adequate supply of affordable land for housing the poor.

4. A financial objective: the advance acquisition and demarcation of the rights-of-way of the entire arterial road network.

Note the third objective (Solly put it first, to his credit), anti-poverty. As we’ve seen before, an economically growing city crowds out affordable housing, pushing the poor to the periphery, the slums inside, or the streets. If the great city is the city that accommodates its poor, then affordable housing is an integral part of urban infrastructure, and it must be planned for in advance.

Some 60 years passed before the grid arrived at 155th Street. Streets were still “rough and ragged” tracks for a long while. Even so, the grid gave the island a kind of monumentality and order.

It gave scalability and accessibility.

Was it monotonous? Yes.

Nonsense. That’s a nowist retrospective of a city whose blocks have all been built into windowed canyons.

No skyscrapers here: Columbus Circle, 1892

Frederick Law Olmsted was among those who thought so.

Olmsted was not so discriminating; he valued parks everywhere, even in hodgepodge Brooklyn and swerving wetland Boston.

Plenty of green space here: Madison Square, 1894

(But note the streetcars.)

Other city plans are certainly more sophisticated (Paris) or elegant (Barcelona) or stately (Savannah, Ga.).

Barcelona’s Cerda Plan

Barcelona’s modern plan, like many of those in the latter half of the 19th century (such as Haussman’s Paris or L’Enfant’s Washington DC), used arterial boulevards leading to plazas to create axes within the lattice. Cerda’s Barcelona gains its charm because none of the buildings are skyscrapers.

The grid, with Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia

Instead they are little courtyard squares of similar heights, like a giant’s boxwood garden.

Is the plaza in the center?

In 1965 John Reps, an urban historian at Cornell, wrote in The Making of Urban America that the city commissioners “were motivated mainly by narrow considerations of economic gain.” Professor Reps thought they put money before aesthetics.

Pushing 90 and still active: John Reps

Sometimes the best thing is the lattice itself.

They did, but that view now seems a little uncharitable. Money and aesthetics aren’t antithetical, and the grid has proved itself oddly beautiful.

I’m referring not just to the sociability it promotes, which Jane Jacobs identified –

Nothing that I’ve read in Jane Jacobs extolled the grid; if anything, she was anti-grid because she was anti-urban renewal. Jane Jacobs loved bodega-strewn walkable neighborhoods, which grids may not inhibit but certainly do little to promote.

– or to the density it allows, which Rem Koolhaas celebrates –

Since many of us like density in the urban environment, what distinguishes Mr. Koolhaas appears to be his love of arbitrary angularity.

Architecture as crystalline exterior: Seattle public library

– or even to the ecological efficiency it sustains, which now makes New York, on a per-capita basis, a very green place.

As I’ve posted many times, cities are greener than suburbs – because they go up, and they go up because of technology, which requires formalization to access large-scale capital finance.

A grid helps with verticality

Now Mr. Kimmelman waxes more rhapsodic than his subject matter justifies:

Manhattan’s grid is not perfectly regular. Some blocks are longer than others. Some avenues are wider. Broadway cuts diagonally across six north-south streets, and those cuts have made room for public spaces (Union Square, Madison Square, Herald Square, Times Square, Columbus Circle, Verdi Square).

We feel all these shifts in the grid, alert to changes thanks to the expectation of sameness.

The grid also makes a complex place instantly navigable. This isn’t a trivial benefit. Cities like Berlin and London, historic agglomerations of villages, include vast nowhere stretches –

So does Manhattan or the Midwestern grid cities of Detroit, or Cleveland. Grid layouts are no defense against economic depression and depopulation.

– and they sprawl in ways that discourage easy comprehension and walking.

To claim grids encourage walking is to stretch. As anyone knows who’s tried to walk through Manhattan during the business day, the sidewalks are overrun with people, including gawkers, and the intersections are always self-congested between traffic-jammed cars and pedestrians.

Walkable … and congested

An epicenter of diversity, Manhattan by contrast invites long walks, because walkers can judge distances easily and always know where they are. The grid binds the island just as New Yorkers are bound by a shared identity.

Mr. Kimmelman is babbling, for the exact same things can be said of Salt Lake City, and few would call it walkable.

Hilary Ballon, a professor of urban studies and architecture at New York University who organized the exhibition (running through April 15, adds that it even affects our daily behavior.

“We cross at corners with the grid,” is her example.

Happy at the grid? Hilary Ballon

A poor example: Manhattan corners are impossible to navigate, incredibly inefficient.

That’s not quite the New York I know, but it’s true that when we jaywalk or take shortcuts across plazas or stroll down Broadway, we are aware of violating the grid. The grid is the ego to our id.

No, it would be the superego, the reasoning force..