Rather than presumed, that buildings and city forms are a transparent medium of cultural expression, the relationship

only works the other way around. The more we know about cultures, about the structure of society in various periods of history in different parts of the world, the better we are able to read their built environment. We will have to come to grips with the fact that the orthogonal grid has accommodated a startling variety of social structures (aristocracy, agrarian republicanism, cosmic visions, speculation). There is no point in seeing a grid and connecting it automatically with another, unless examining the social premises. Legal and economic history City planning Kevin Lynch Good City Form (1981): The cosmic model or holy model the plan is an interpretation of the universe and the gods. - Monumental axis, enclosure and gates, dominant landmarks, reliance on the regular grid, spatial organization by hierarchy - Discount all practical, technological, economic or sanitary explanations for the layout and placement The practical model or the city as a machine - Small, autonomous, undifferentiated parts, linked up to a great machine which in contrast has clearly differentiated functions and motions - speculations - Needs constant tuning and updating, mechanical adjustments The organic model or the biological city - Definite boundary, optimized size, a cohesive, indivisible internal structure and a rhythmic behavior that seeks to maintain a balanced state - Interventions to correct will be in nature of surgery

Cities are amalgams of buildings and people. They are inhabited settlings from which daily rituals the mundane and the extraordinary, the random and the staged derive their validity. In the urban artifact and its mutations are condensed continuities of time and place. The city is the ultimate memorial of our struggles and glories: it is where the pride of the past is set on display. Sometimes cities are laid out as perfect shapes and for premeditated ends. They may aim to reflect a cosmic rule or an ideal society, be cast as a machine of war, or have no bigger purpose than to generate profit for the founder. A myth of propitiousness and high destiny may come to surround the act of founding. Or this act may be nothing more than a routinized and repetitive event. But whether born under divine guidance or the speculative urge, the pattern will dry up, and even die, unless the people forge within it a special, self-sustaining life that can survive adversity and the turns of fortune. Few social values and actions are so abstract that they fail to be reflected in material forms. M.P.Cozen in Morphology of Nineteenth-Century Cities

Urban process is in large measure the story of urban development within the pre-existing frame or ground plan. It manifests itself through changes in plot configuration, and the size and scale of the solid structures that occupy it. Mannerist grid The pre-industrial city (Gideon Sjoberg): small size (rarely more than 100.000 people); lack of land use specialization; little social and physical mobility; an elite and a lower class. The centre is taken up by government and religion and the residences of the elite. Occupational groupings are everywhere the rule. Industrial city: begins much before the 18. Century, actually in 1500.