{"id":950,"date":"2012-01-08T06:40:30","date_gmt":"2012-01-08T13:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=950"},"modified":"2013-01-11T02:16:08","modified_gmt":"2013-01-11T09:16:08","slug":"the-greatest-grid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=950","title":{"rendered":"The Greatest Grid"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“The Greatest Grid” (Wikimedia Commons)<\/p><\/div>\n

At least that\u2019s what the Museum of the City of New York proclaims in the title of a new exhibition<\/a> about the 1811 Manhattan street plan that\u2019s currently celebrating its 200th<\/sup> birthday.\u00a0 It\u2019s a bold claim, given the grid\u2019s great antiquity as an element of urban planning.\u00a0 But then again, it\u2019s New York.<\/p>\n

Michael Kimmelman<\/a> offered his analysis of the grid\u2019s pros and cons in last week\u2019s New York Times<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 Its imposed order is \u201cheartless\u201d to the \u00a0extent that it eschews a single center and allows for very few grand public spaces. \u00a0The grid is uniquely disposed to land speculation and, consequently, human displacement.\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019d add that pedestrianizing any one cardinal boulevard or avenue risks marginalizing and deadening adjacent streets, as has happened (arguably) here in Denver with the 16th<\/sup> Street Mall.\u00a0 Other scholars (e.g., here<\/a>)have argued that the grid–when considered in historical perspective–is most commonly associated with politically centralized, autocratic societies.<\/p>\n

On the plus side, the grid is eminently flexible and adaptable.\u00a0 Mr. Kimmelman notes that Manhattan\u2019s grid accommodated Central Park, the internal irregularity of which provides a nice contrast to an otherwise monotonous orthogonal order.\u00a0 The grid is nothing if not \u201clegible\u201d, allowing visitors to easily grasp a city\u2019s layout.\u00a0 In so doing it makes a city instantly navigable. \u00a0Indeed, Mr. Kimmelman argues that Manhattan\u2019s grid invites long walks by residents and tourists alike, thereby contributing to urban environmental sustainability.\u00a0\u00a0 In this respect New York contrasts with Berlin and London, whose historic agglomeration of villages \u201cdiscourage easy comprehension and walking.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Denver’s 16th Street Mall (Wikimedia Commons)<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

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For Mr. Kimmelman the New York grid\u2014even without elegant squares, axial boulevards, and other elements that break up the monotony\u2014can circumscribe neighborhoods and promote sociability in the Jacobsian sense<\/a>.\u00a0 He asserts that the grid can still support the kind of block-to-block architectural and social variety that fosters \u201curban theatre\u201d of the grandest sort.\u00a0 Moreover\u2014and most extravagantly\u2014he asserts that the grid is neatly predisposed to facilitating what I would call \u201cintercultural integration.\u201d Because of the grid\u2019s legibility anyone\u2014resident, tourist, and transient alike\u2014can use it to take possession of the city, to make it their own.\u00a0 In Mr. Kimmelman’s words “anybody can become a New Yorker” and thus partake of that shared identity.\u00a0 New York’s grid gives physical form to the democratic idea of the urban \u201cmelting pot\u201d\u2014much more so than places like Rome, Hamburg, Copenhagen, or Tokyo.<\/p>\n

I like Mr. Kimmelman\u2019s article because it serves his admirable mission<\/a> to put built form in a social context; to explore the relationship between what we build and how we live.\u00a0 In celebrating the grid Mr. Kimmelman in many ways channels Spiro Kostof, who in The<\/em> <\/a>City Shaped<\/a><\/em> notes that there\u2019s nothing inherently authoritarian or exploitative in a gridded plan. It can support and sustain \u201clittle villages\u201d of the Jacobsian sort, and also be placed in the service of popular protest and dissent.\u00a0 For Kostof, how any urban plan functions socially depends on exactly how it is \u201cfleshed out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, legibility and navigability is one thing; sociability and intercultural integration is quite another.\u00a0 Legibility and navigability certainly don\u2019t guarantee the production of social interaction, shared experience, and mutual understanding. \u00a0They are just as likely\u2014if not more so\u2014to produce greater atomization and fragmentation; to reinforce the status of urban space as\u2014in the words of Richard Sennett<\/a>\u2014a \u201cplace of gaze\u201d rather than a \u201cscene of discourse.\u201d \u00a0 Lower Manhattan\u2019s Zuccotti Park has gained fame as a particularly lively discursive scene.\u00a0 But for all the physical virtues and social impact of what took place in Zuccotti Park, the eviction of Occupy protestors has sparked much discussion<\/a> about the availability of genuine public space in New York.\u00a0 The future of civic discourse and dissent may require something more than the privately owned public spaces or POPS<\/a> that emerged in New York purely as zoning anomalies.<\/p>\n

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Ogilby and Morgan’s Map of 1677 (Wikipedia)<\/p><\/div>\n

So in contrast to Mr. Kimmelman I\u2019d argue that the prospects for intercultural dialogue and integration are better in cities having plans that discourage<\/em> legibility and easy comprehension. The prospects are better where people are challenged\u2014as one online commentator on Mr. Kimmelman\u2019s piece noted\u2014to \u201cuse their brain\u201d in civic navigation.\u00a0 London defies easy comprehension but there\u2019s nothing like shared confusion about location and direction for stimulating conversation and a collective striving to meet the navigability challenge.\u00a0 Another virtue of London\u2019s historic agglomeration is that memorials, monuments, and other physical vestiges of the city\u2019s history are embedded in the urban fabric rather than exiled,\u00a0as they have been in New York as a consequence of 1811 planning<\/a>, to parks or–most famously in New York’s case–to an island in the middle of a harbor.\u00a0 It\u2019s the potential to be ever-surprised by the discovery of these artifacts of cultural history that makes navigating the non-gridded city so joyful and satisfying. \u00a0In my two brief stints living in London I came to feel more ownership of\u00a0 the city\u2014and more kinship with Londoners\u2014than I ever felt in all my years of growing up in New York.<\/p>\n

This piece is also posted at the New York Urban website:\u00a0http:\/\/newyorkurban.info\/the-greatest-grid-intercultural-urbanism<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At least that\u2019s what the Museum of the City of New York proclaims in the title of a new exhibition about the 1811 Manhattan street plan that\u2019s currently celebrating its 200th birthday.\u00a0 It\u2019s a bold claim, given the grid\u2019s great […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[8,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-urban-studies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-fk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=950"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2397,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950\/revisions\/2397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}