THE CITY SHAPED

Urban patterns and meanings through history

- Spiro Kostof

Submitted by:
Niyomi Dalal (0904)
This book is divided into 5 main chapters, each having sub-chapters.

The chapter selected here is “The Grid”, with subchapters being:

- Introduction to the grid
- History of the grid
- Grid in the 20th century

INTRODUCTION TO THE GRID

• “The pack-donkey‟s way is responsible for the plan of every continental city” , said Le
Corbusier in one of his books on urbanism. Just as a packed donkey meanders along,
stops at intervals, zig-zags inorder to avoid larger stones or to gain a little shade, so
also is the organization and layout of a city.

• However, man walks in a straight line and peels off from it at right angles when he
needs to, because he has a goal and knows where he is going. On a path where
there are no obstructions, he would rather arrive by a straight path, than a crooked
one.

• This simple, rational order of pacing the land with streets at right angles to one
another; feels the author, is the first step in settlement planning.
• THE NATURE OF RECTILINEAR PLANNING
The four primary abstract principles of architectural organization maybe classified as below:
1. Nuclear: organized around a point 2. Axial: organized along a line

3. Branching: organized along sub-axii along a 4. Grid: organized as equal units and
main axis. hence no sense of hierarchy exists.

• Geometry is a theory of spaces – an order of lines and angles, and one of the simplest ways of making
order in terms of city planning is to have horizontal and vertical co ordinates in orthogonal relationship to
one another.
• The grid is the most common of all patterns for planned cities in history.
• It is a means for equal distribution of land, and its rectilinear street patterns help in easy selling
or buying of real estate.
• It applies to country and town, fields and streets, and most basically, it divides an undifferentiated
stretch of land into regular measured plots.
• It has had its advantages in
Gate 2
matters of defense and also in
keeping under watch a
relentless population.

• Biggest examples being those

of refugee and prisoner
camps. For example, the
Romans had a rigid
rectangular layout determined
by two crossing streets- the
via principalis and the porta
principalis dextra, that led to
four principal gates and
divided the camp into four Gate 1 Gate 3
quadrants.

• This form, which was

originally used for the
temporary camps of the
soldiers in new colonies,
became the built form of those
cities.

Gate 4
Roman camps
• The Spanish on the other hand, had small mud houses for the soldiers, which along with a chapel,
a storehouse and a guard house, were lined around a square which served as a parade ground.
• The grid is a flexible system of planning and hence very successful. One thing common about all
grids is that their street pattern is orthogonal and street lines in both directions lie parallel to each
other.

• The author then gives the examples of two well preserved grid schemes
from two different cultural contexts – China and Colonial America.

• An ancient Chinese city Suzhou, was destroyed during the reign of the
Sung dynasty and its new design was engraved on a stone in 1229 AD.
- The planning here is indeed orthogonal, but free of dogmatic symmetry,
continuous straight lines or uniform divisions into blocks.

- Yet it had a rhythmic complexity and was executed according to precise

calculations of measurements and levels.

- The street lines throughout the city were paralleled by a system of canals
- 6 ran N-S and 14 ran E-W.

- In shape, the city was a walled rectangle about 10 by 5 kms. The focus of
the city was the large walled and moated enclosure of the government
complex, seen in the centre in the adjoining picture.
Engraving on stone depicting the plan of Suzhou
 • Savannah, situated in Georgia, in the United States Of America, was laid out in 1733 AD. The city
was organized into wards, each with its own square, measuring around 96 by 82 mts.
• On the East and West sides of each square, lots were set out for public buildings like churches and
stores. The other two sides were divided into 40 house lots.
• 10 freeholders formed a tything (probably a type of a colony) and 4 tythings made up a ward.

Ward

Tything

Plan

• Tythings were grouped in 2 rows of 5

houselots, back to back, sharing a lane
or alley.
• The ward unit was repeated and this
pattern was well extended into the 19th
century. Savannah
• HISTORY OF THE GRID
- The principle of the grid organization has been traced to as far as 2500 to 3000 BC at Mohen jo Daro
and Harappa in the Indus Valley.The town, with accommodation for workers and artisans, was laid out
on a rectangular grid of main streets and smaller lanes.
- An orthogonal street layout was oriented with the main streets toward the north-south direction,
sometimes in a staggered manner. Secondary streets are about half the width of the main streets,
oriented towards east-west; smaller alleys are a one third of the width of the main streets.

Mohen jo daro
• During the 6th century BC in Greece the grid was seen as an interpretation of the democratic, political and social system.
Geometrical precision was achieved through mathematical development of the Pythagorean principle. Almost all the
Greek cities planned were based on this principle of the grid organization.
• The division of the Greek grid was by strips rather than by blocks, and the city walls wrapped themselves loosely around
it. Gridded Greek cities were subdivided by a system of wide main roads and narrow streets. In most grids the streets
intersected at right angles. The Greek town also had a large number of public buildings to match those of modern cities
today.
• The origin of Greek orthogonal planning tradition was based on the established civilizations of the Near East, for example,
Kahun in ancient Egypt and Babylon in Mesopotamia. Greek early cities grew from villages, but when they colonized new
lands, they adopted the grid system. The rebuilding of cities also presented another opportunity for orthogonal town
planning: Miletus, on the coast of Asia minor, was razed by the Persians in 494 BC before it was rebuilt on a grid.

Miletus
Babylon
The city of Babylon is situated on a large plain. It is square in
shape, and each side is fourteen miles long, so that the
complete circuit is fifty-six miles. It is built like no other city
known to the Greeks. A wide deep moat full of water runs round
it, and inside the moat is a wall 330 feet high and 86 feet thick.
• Greek influence continued along the shores of the Mediterranean, where Romans later held sway.
The Romans modified the Greek order of town planning to suite their own order, with its intense
centralization of the power structure, by introducing the axii and creating major linear focus in the
grid organization. Here the aim was military discipline and order with a central command. By 89
BC, the Roman grid had developed its own identity – a more unitary plan with large square blocks,
strong grid lines and the forum placed on or beside the crossing of two major axes.
• Timgad is the most well preserved of all the Roman cities. The grid of Timgad consists of 4 parts
of 36 blocks each, 144 blocks in all, of which 11 are taken up by the forum, 6 by the theatre and 8
by the baths. When new public buildings were needed, they were developed outside the grid.

Timgad
• In ancient Egypt, villages at places like Giza had primitive grids, since they believed that was “the
best and quickest way to organize a homogeneous population with a single social purpose.” Also,
on both sides of the river Nile, orthogonal planning came naturally, since the river was a linear axis
running N-S and everything had to run either alongside or at right angles to it, in the direction of
the rising and setting sun. After the floods, which replenished the soils each year, the farmers
would rebuild the bunds parallel and perpendicular to the river. As population grew, people started
building on the farmlands, and the pattern followed the pre-existing boundaries.

Ancient town of Kahun

Settlements on two sides of the river Nile

• The world‟s first “workers‟ housing” may be at the ancient town of Kahun built about 3000BC for the
builders of the pyramids at Kahun near Giza. The town was laid out on a rectilinear grid, and comprised a
few large houses and many smaller ones, the latter containing four or five rooms each. On higher ground
was a small acropolis serving as a community centre, place of worship and seat of government.
 The Chinese grid was more of a political diagram, a square or rectangular form was established and
the city was aligned in the four cardinal directions. There were two basic models for the layout of
new capital cities.
•The first model was in Changan during the 7th century, wherein the
palace is at the north end of a central axis and the town developed around
it.

•This capital of the Tang Dynasty was a

city of about a million people, laid out
according to cosmological planning
principles.

•The theory of the Chinese city is rooted Basic layout

in this system and undergoes little
variation during 2000 years of
urbanization.
Checkerboard grid
•Changan is oriented to the cardinal
points, north-south and enclosed by an
orthogonal double set of walls, with three
sets of gates on each side.

•It is divided into a checkerboard grid, Changan

each block reserved for one of the 108
wards, which would have had as many as
10,000 inhabitants in each.
•The ward is enclosed in its own walls with gates
that were closed every night. These wards were
Arial view
organized according to geographic location and
ethnicity.
• The second model was in Beijing, wherein the palace is in the
middle of the city and the rest of the city developed around it.
Here, symmetrical arrangement of houses, offices and shops
was made on either side of the central axis. Land was given
proper division. The main aim was to create a center to which the
people could look.

Basic layout

Palace

Arial view showing the palace

at the centre and the rest of the
city surrounding it
 THE GRID IN THE 20th CENTURY
In the 20th century, the traditional grid form was This traditional grid form was replaced by the
replaced by the modern building typologies. Enclosed modern building typologies in 1915 in
blocks with large open courtyards were built in the Amsterdam, wherein a grid having long
1890‟s in Berlin. courtyard-framing housing blocks with uniform
facades, with an intention to obscure class
differences was designed.

Amsterdam
Berlin

• As time passed and urbanism grew, the grid was seen as a source of urban misery. The
modernist society condemned high density block development on the grounds, as they believed it
denied the tenants light, air and sunshine.

• However, the increasing growth of traffic couldn‟t make do without the grid. The boundaries of
cities increased due to automobiles, leading to growth in traffic, making streets extremely
dangerous. Thus came about the notion of abandoning the grid altogether, and making large blocks
bounded by major traffic roads. Within each block would be a sort of a „minigrid‟ which would define
neighbourhood.
• This kind of arrangement is found in old Jaipur. Taking it as a case study, I learnt the following:
- Jaipur was founded in the year 1727 AD and it was confined within walls upto 1860, irrespective
of population growth, since it had ample scope for further settlements.
- The expansion of Jaipur happened in around 1922, and new land development schemes were
prepared, thus making it a „planned‟ city.
- Jaipur has a linear type of layout, wherein there is one main street and hoses are arranged on
either side. If population increases or more houses are required, streets parallel to the first street
and more cross streets are added. In the case of Jaipur, there is only one primary street running
E-W and two intersecting streets running N-S.
- This principle axis is tilted at an angle of 15 degrees in order to facilitate the flow of water and
drainage, by aligning it with the natural topography.
- This subdivision of Jaipur divided it into “sectors” and within each sector was a looser grid
defining the neighbourhoods.

Jaipur
 • In America however, people felt that the conventional street grid restricted residents to rectangular
islands surrounded by noise, dirt, fumes and danger and social life was almost nil. Hence the
need arose to design self contained „superblocks‟ which had their own shops, schools and
community facilities.

• At Chandigarh, one can see an interpenetration of green

landscape and a loose grid pattern of primary roads
defining the superblocks.
- These superblocks or sectors had proportions based on
the Golden Section. They are communities oriented
inward, so that the primary traffic roads have little street
life.
- Each block is bisected lengthwise by one major local
street, which along with a market street form a linear
shopping system.
Chandigarh

- The most thoroughly worked out modernist grid of the

recent years is in Milton Keynes in England, the last of
the English new towns. This grid system is made up of
roadways defining one kilometer squares, and it is not at
all rigid.

- The street lines gradually rise and fall in sync with the
surrounding contoured land. Also, the roads are bordered
by thick tree-walls intended to absorb traffic noise.
Milton Keynes
 CONCLUSIONS

Having gone through a variety of grids, I understand that the following considerations are probably
made during the designing of a gridded urban form:

• The size and shape of the blocks and their internal organizations.
• The open spaces and their distribution.
• The accommodation of public buildings.
• The nature of the street grid, whether or not a systematic distinction is made between primary and
secondary streets.
• The termination of the grid – whether it is open ended or locked into a system of city gates.
• The relation of the grid to the surrounding country and the features of the topography.

The laying out of the grid involves two processes simultaneously:

a. Designing of the street grid and block pattern.

a. Designing of detailed grid of plot parcels within the block.

• Decisions regarding allocation of land to owners is made before, or at the same time as the
drawing of the street lines.
• The shape and topography of land affects the formation of the gridded urban form over it – where
the ground is flat, the grid remains as is. But even on flat land, the broad physical characteristics of
the site may be reflected. For eg. Towns formed on the banks of rivers will tend to have their main
streets parallel to the river, with a small number of connecting cross streets.
 • On rolling topography, to have a simple, uncompromised grid is very rare.
• Take for example, Priene in Turkey, wherein the original town was at the mouth of a river, which
led to silting problems. The new city which was intended for a larger population, was built on high
ground city blocks were placed on the main E-W streets, whereas N-S streets were meant for
pedestrians and were cut into steps at places.

Priene

• So generally, where land was flat, the blocks were placed in regular grids, but where topography changed,
the scale of he grid changed as ell, with larger angular blocks and a much looser form.

• Thus on the whole, the author talks about how the grid, being used as a means of city planning since
almost 2000 BC, is neither standard for all cities, nor predictable, can readily adjust to any sort of topography,
be it flat terrain or hill slopes, is extremely flexible and can vary in terms of urban scale, has helped in political
administration. He explains how it was in the ancient times, how it has evolved since and how it continues to
be the most simplest and effective method of city planning.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
- Thesis: Evaluation of the grid as an organization principle in architecture.
- Thesis: Significant dimensions of an urban environment
- Thesis: Emergence of order in urban form
- Net references: - Indus valley civilization - D.P. Aggrawal
- The art and architecture of ancient Egypt - W. Stevenson Smith
- www.britannica.com
- www.nationalgeographic.com
- www.tslr.com
- Google images