Yesterday I was walking with some co-workers at lunch. The new guy, still annoyed after a series of weekend wrong turns threw him off course for hours, wanted everyone to know that Boston is much harder to navigate than, say, Seattle or New York City. The grid layout, he insisted, is ingenious. The others generally agreed that a consistent system for navigation—streets ordered in alphabetic and numeric sequences and placed at regular intervals—represents the triumph of urban planning over the undesirable chaos of nature.
As one who is usually delighted by consistency, I was at a loss to explain why I was so distraught by their easy position. Today, I found the answer in a photographer’s note in a magazine:
“Taking this… atop the tallest building in Santiago surrounded by smog and sprawl, I then understood that I define a city as a place that has developed beyond the control of those who built it.” (David Allee, Metropolis, April 2006, p. 200)
I need to tell you of an incident early on in my relationship with SWMBO (so that’s about 36 years ago come June) while attempting to find an address in LA using one of those popular map books they use out there, all bound and perfect-like.
Marsha looked down and picked off the number painted on the curb of the home we were in front of and asserted that all we had to do was go over ["seven blocks"] and about a block to the south and we’d have it. Nice, innocent, East Coast 25 year-old that I was, I objected to the declaration and said we’d have to go over but frog around a bit and we wouldn’t likely know whether to go north or south.
I was disabused of this certainty and, in the middle of it, a trained secondary social studies teacher, it dawned on me what she was going on about: the Northwest Ordinance — that gave the American people grid lines for quarters, laid out on the square mile, AND ruly, the public school system that would emerge from it: universal education — and I had just ben educated…all over again…as she has managed to accomplish in our relationship, sometimes daily, for all the intervening years.
I am sure that is wrong.
And that your love of “organized disarray” (you still do have it, don’t you, despite the recent rationalizaiton?) is valuable and has integrity: let’s you and I agree to preserve it—art being often more valuable to humankind than mere science-without-art, and more essential to science, too.
Your coments counter needs medication.
BTW…cities of the sort that Boston is…they are distinctly NOT planned.