Most North American cities are laid out on a city grid, and that urban planning decision, made centuries ago, still shapes daily life in ways most residents never think about. We explore the roots of North American city grids in the opening episode of the Saving the City documentary series about how to make cities better places.
The city grid urban planning tradition in North America goes back further than most people realize. William Penn’s 1682 plan for Philadelphia was one of the first. James Oglethorpe’s 1733 plan for Savannah added a series of civic squares to the city grid, punctuating the geometry with public space. The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 stretched Manhattan’s city grid north to 155th Street. And Salt Lake City mapped its city grid in 1847 before a single street or building was even built.
Penn’s Philadelphia plan was shaped by his firsthand experience of 17th-century London, which had just suffered through the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666. His response was a city grid of broad streets and lots large enough to build a home with gardens on either side: a “greene country towne” that used urban design to promote health and space.
The history of urban planning in Philadelphia begins with that vision. It is a city that has been remaking itself ever since, and that spirit of reinvention, rooted in its original city grid, is central to what Saving the City documents across its opening episodes.
Where Penn’s city grid urban planning was driven by civic ideals, Manhattan’s was driven by real estate. The 1811 Commissioners’ Plan was designed to cram the maximum number of lots onto a long, narrow island because, as the plan put it, “right-angled houses are the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in.” The history of urban planning in Manhattan is inseparable from that commercial logic.
Then there are the more formal European-inspired plans: Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s 1791 plan for Washington DC and Judge Augustus B. Woodward’s 1805 plan for Detroit, both of which blended traditional city grids with radial streets and grand boulevards drawn from the history of urban design in Paris and other European capitals.
Meet David Brownlee, Professor of Art and Architectural History at the University of Pennsylvania, on the history of urban planning and the city grid traditions that shaped North American cities. Watch more videos.
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