Colonial architecture and the Westerner
I’ve just returned from traveling in Morocco the past couple weeks, and while my mind is full of lots of vivid images of the places, my thoughts keep turning again and again to … architecture. In an earlier post on this site, I wrote about how I’ve fallen in love with Boston, its curvy, chaotic maze of streets that center on important places and squares. I in fact now prefer this kind of arrangement to the more utilitarian, and more boring, grid city. Yet I find that in Morocco my sentiments are reversed!
During the period of colonial occupation the French (and to a lesser extent the Spanish) laid out their own neighborhood in each city, now universally referred to as the ville nouvelle. These were usually near the main gate to the old, walled medina, but in strong contrast to the medina have broad, straight avenues, with columned arcades. Generally, to my eyes the ville nouvelle seem a success of urban planning. There is better pedestrian flow here than in the medina, which generally lacks sidewalks (and cars, if the streets are truly narrow!). The streets in the ville nouvelle provide beautiful vistas of nearby mountains or oversized fountains. And, as Louis Mumford might cynically add, they are far easier to police and suppress than the narrow medina, which may go a long way to explaining the French motivation.
But clearly Morrocans prefer the medina for their shopping and (with the exception of some rich suburbs) for their living. The street network is so complex in some places, like Fez, that even with a map this Bostonian got lost, and yet the residents have memorized its layout. The enforced elbow-to-elbow contact in the medina, while hard for Americans with our huge personal space bubbles, is truthfully far more conducive to personal exchange and window-shopping than the huge arcades of the ville nouvelle.
In the end, I have realized that my love for the ville nouvelle arises out of my fear of the medina, its complexity, its lack of privacy, its overwhelming intensity. And so in some sick way I feel akin to the French colonialists, who must have had the same fear of the medina that I do today. I suppose the truth is that curvy, organic designs are often perfect for locals. Foreigners (in the broadest sense of that term), however, love the straight line.
My instinct is to prefer a more chaotic, organic, street system over a rigidly gridded one. But over time I've started to think a balance between the two is usually best. And that it is sensible for street systems to adapt to the landscape to some degree. Also, while numbered streets are often easier to navigate, named streets are more personable.. compare Milk Street in Boston to, say, 12th Street in New York City. On the other hand, 5th Avenue has acquired a strong character as a name, even though it is just a number.
Grid systems and numbered streets have been so extensively used in the US, there are plenty of examples where it makes things harder. In the Seattle metro area, there is a general grid, with mostly numbered streets. It works fairly well, but there are quite a few places where the terrain is hilly enough to force the streets out of strict grid patterns, yet they tend to retain their number names even as they twist and curve all out of orientation. Now that is annoying!
Manhattan, as a long narrow, mostly level island, may be ideal for the numbered grid system. It is notable, I think, that Manhattan's grid is aligned not to compass directions, but to the island's shape.
I think Philadelphia was among the first cities to use a street grid with numbers going one way and names the other. That system seems to have been copied all over the US, even using the basic street names like Chestnut, Elm, Front, Market, etc.
In any case, a visit to Paris got me to appreciate the mix of dense mazy little streets and long, broad, straight avenues.
Posted by: pfly | 10/31/2005 at 11:05