building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

The grid as landscape
As anticipated in the previous paragraph, the success of Jefferson’s ideal of an
agricultural democracy soon merged with the events of the farmers’ colonisation of
the West.
Furthermore, it has to be stressed that the policy for awarding state lands, with
provisions and planning devices established over the years, ended by also shaping
the development of town and territorial planning.
The endless American suburbia of today is in some way linked to these dynamics.
The ideal of freedom, which developed in contrast to life in the cities, was the
element which undermined the integrity of the town planning of the latter, often
stretching them over too wide a grid. Even though the grid had been introduced by
the Europeans in the first settled towns, we can say today that it is the most
straightforward town planning heirloom of frontier America [Figures 45‐46], which
encouraged a sort of counter‐culture of planning focusing on decongestion 82 .
Even though the grid is severely limited as it sees the territory in only two
dimensions, it enabled cities to be planned and expanded quickly and inexpensively.
As Reps claimed, this checkerboard system from the colonial era gave rise to
“senseless mechanized and unimaginative town planning which was to characterize
much of the 19 th century” 83 but also to quality town planning solutions, such as
“New Haven, with a generous one‐ninth of the original town left as an open green;
or Savannah, with its multiple squares breaking the monotony of the grid; or
Jeffersonville, with its alternating pattern of open squares and building blocks. Even
Philadelphia’s original plan contained the five squares laid out by Penn, the largest
intended as a town center and the four smaller as recreation grounds” 84 .
82 See ESPERDY, Gabrielle, “Defying the grid: A Retroactive Manifesto for the Culture of
Decongestion”, Perspecta, Vol. 30, The MIT Press, 1999, pp. 10‐33
83 REPS, John William, Town Planning in Frontier America, Princeton, University Press, 1965, p. 428
(Italian translation by M. Terni, S. Magistretti, La costruzione dell’ America urbana, introduction by
Francesco Dal Co, Milano, Franco Angeli, 1976, p. 347)
84 Ibid.
46