What Forms the City?
- Luke Morris
- Nov 18, 2014
- 4 min read
The forms of the city—from dendritic to grid-iron—are driven by economics, not by culture. Culture only influences the growth of the city by way of dictating how economic resources are dispersed, but examples of similar city types are evident regardless of culture, location, or time. It is described in History of Urban Form: Before the Industrial Revolutions, by AEJ Morris that the earliest cities formed due to available resources, but I would like to take it one step further and show how it’s these economic factors that continue to be the main driver for the form of the city, rather than culture which seems to be the general consensus. Like I stated before, culture does dictate how prosperity is dispersed among the general public so it can’t be ignored completely, but by understanding that economics is the key factor, we can better predict how the city will grow and change by paying attention to its impetus.
The first cities grew organically, different cities requiring different things dependent on local factors, but all acquiring a dendritic form regardless. For the most part, buildings were constructed with straight walls and angled corners, obviously for pragmatic reasons. Eventually rulers rise as populations grow and territory (economic gain) increases. The first example of any sort of grid-iron pattern comes from the palaces of these rulers. Being at the pinnacle of economic gain, rulers are the first to be able to plan a larger swath of area, and they plan it in a rectilinear form.
Even though palaces and large civic buildings are the first to be created with this rectilinear form, the surrounding cities often retained their dendritic layouts. However, this starts to change with three evolution types: the city of the ruling class, the city of humanism, and the colony. These three overarching city categories developed around the world, in cities independent from one another, with nothing but the economic drivers that link each one.
The city of the ruling class is typically a capital city, or a city where the important and wealthy reside almost exclusively. Examples of this city form are Ch’ang-an, China (early 7th century AD), Kyoto, Japan (late 7th century AD), and Teotihuacan in Mexico. These cities were important cities to the regions they controlled, and were populated by the wealthiest of the society.
The city of humanism is generally associated with Classical Greece and Renaissance Europe, but an important note is that both of these periods were marked by relative peace and prosperity. The grid-iron plans from classical Greece are most credited to Hippodamus of Miletus in the 5th century BC. Hippodamus was described by Aristotle as “the first person not a statesman who made inquiries about the best form of government.” (Aristotle, quoted Kriesis, “Greek Town Building”) With an apparent interest in better government of the people, and certainly influenced by philosophers of the time, Hippodamus goes to create a grid-iron plan for Miletus after it was razed. He was later commissioned to plan completely new cities such as Priene, Thurii and others, but they fall into the category of colony cities that I will describe later. The European Renaissance is also concerned with the condition of the individual, and grid-iron, orthogonal plans are drafted that represent this.
The colony city is created with the idea of speed of construction due to uniformity in mind. With the success of Hippodamus’ Miletus plan, his later cities are used as plans for colonies because of the ability to construct them anywhere with ease as well as their acceptance of growth. Later forms of the grid-iron plan being used for colonization are produced by the Romans around the Mediterranean, as well as the Europeans in the Americas and elsewhere. This need for rapid construction was dictated by the need to impose control over the region for economic gain, and it required economic wealth to create the city in the first place.
From these three different grid-iron city types, it is easy to see the spread of the grid-iron city due to economic factors, but what about the Middle-East? The Islamic Empire during the Middle Ages was a stark contrast to Europe at the same time. Often considered to the be Islamic Golden Age, from the mid-8th to the 13th centuries AD, a vast area of land stretching from ancient Persia, through Northern Africa and into Spain enjoyed a time of prosperity and knowledge. With such large economic resources, though, how come the cities of the Middle-East retained their dendritic forms? To answer that question, I turned to Renaissance Europe as an example.
Both European and Middle-Eastern cities grew in dendritic patterns, the main difference being that Middle-Eastern blocks were much larger, but a block none-the-less. In the Middle-East, these cities continued to grow in a dendritic fashion as population grew, just as European cities did. What changed, though, was the need to develop large areas of land at one time. With the discovery of the Americas, and a population boom, European cities required rapid development which was never needed in the Middle-East. What did happen in the Middle-East was the building of Mosques and palaces. These were built orthogonally, and that is where wealth created grid-iron layouts. The constitutional order of streets kept Middle Eastern cities as dendritic forms, just as the city centers of modern-day Europe keep their medieval dendritic forms.
So what can we conclude from these observations? The orthogonal form of the grid-iron city originates from economic drivers, and coalesces itself with the need for rapid expansion in the form of colonies, or the desire for vanity in the form of civic buildings (or civic cities). Either way, what is most important to note is that this form is the status quo of all cultures when able to design ‘by a single hand’ on a ‘tabula rasa’. This orthogonal design continued through to Modernism, which reproduced it at the scale of the car, rather than the human which has led to problems of sprawl that we are dealing with today. It is necessary to understand the outlying factors that cause us as humans to react the way we do in order to refocus our intentions from impulse to create cities for what they are meant for; to enhance the lives of the citizens within its borders, and the wider world itself.
