Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

Rento van Drunen,  Gridcollages

Rento van Drunen’s Gridcollages on pytr75’s blog put my mind back to Albert Pope’s book, Ladders which was published in 1996. This book was very influential on my work and my thinking about urban structures and the systems that are used to put and keep them in place. In Ladders, Pope suggested that the pre war urban grid, when it was first conceived, was an open system. But the post war period saw the grid eroded and slowly replaced with centripetal design strategies. A suburban cul-de-sac or office park, are classic examples of a centripetal system – individuals have little choice but follow a curved paths instead of a straight line. The prewar city was conceived on a centrifugal grid, a road system in which the basic premise was an open spatial field that was boundless and unlimited in form because of its formal simplicity…

via BBC News – Ordos: The biggest ghost town in China.

This picture is taken from an article published on March 17th on the BBC news magazine. It portrays the city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia. 10 years after construction, the new city stands largely empty. The author, Peter Day, tells us:

“The story started about 20 years ago, with the beginning of a great Mongolian coal rush. Private mining companies poured into the green Inner Mongolian steppe lands, pock-marking the landscape with enormous opencast holes in the ground, or tunnelling underground. Local farmers sold their land to the miners, and became instantly rich.

Jobs burgeoned. Ceaseless coal truck convoys tore up the roads. And the old city of Ordos flourished as the money flowed in. The municipality decided to think big, too.

It laid out plans for a huge new town for hundreds of thousands of residents, with…

Lewis Mumford’s The Culture of Cities is a classic: the editors of The City Reader (3^rd edition) go so far as to say that, “Lewis Mumford’s magisterial The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938) was the first and remains the best book on the culture of cities” (2005, 10). Yes and no.

Mumford advocated ‘decentralization’ and earned a reputation for hating large cities. Jane Jacobs, for example, had a different opinion. In her Death and Life of Great American Cities, in a discussion of “orthodox modern city planning and city architectural design” she directs readers to Mumford for “a sympathetic account which mine is not” (1992, 17). On Mumford’s The Culture of Cities, specifically, Jacobs writes that it “was largely a morbid and biased catalog of ills. The great city [for Mumford and others] was Megalopolis, Tyrannopolis, Nekropolis, a monstrosity, a tyranny, a living death. It…