The triumph of the grid

As you, both of my blog readers, will know, I've been spending my year here at MIT in Boston researching the science and engineering behind urban planning. We often take the design of our streets for granted, but everything from the width of pavements to the length of blocks is the result of millennia of experimentation. Many ideas have been ditched, while others have triumphed. And one idea that has proven to be successful all over the world is the grid... the geometric mesh upon which places like Manhattan, Chicago and Barcelona were developed.

It's difficult to say exactly when the grid city first appeared, but in his 1916 book, City Planning, the journalist and urban planning theorist Charles Mulford Robinson wrote, "Herodotus states that Babylon was built four-square, with straight streets that were either parallel or at right angles to one another" (which would make it at least 4,000 years old) and that, Grecian architects, under Hippodamus, used a "rectangular method when platting the streets of Pirenna, Piraeus, Alexandria and Antioch." The Romans later popularised the grid, using it throughout their empire.

Growing up in London, which wasn't designed on a grid but is confusingly organic, has helped me appreciate just how liveable and easy to navigate this style of design can make a town or city. Certainly, ease of travel around grid cities must be one reason for their popularity. But there's another: a Boston architect who teaches one of my my classes at MIT has said that it's the hegemony of the urban plan in cities as clearly planned as Barcelona that makes them so beautiful, because you can place any kind of architecture inside them, and it will never overwhelm the overall plan of the city. Of course many people hate grid plans, for being monotonous and insensitive to the environment, but in the end, in a grid city, the city rules.

The aerial photo above is of Barcelona, as designed by the civil engineer Ildefons Cerda in 1855.