WI NYC wasn't centrally planned

tehskyman

Banned
What would it take for NYC (New york city) to be have a road plan similar to those found in europe and asia where there aren't the clean straight lines. As well what would such a development have on the way that other cities were planned as well as the impact on New York's history
 

iddt3

Donor
What would it take for NYC (New york city) to be have a road plan similar to those found in europe and asia where there aren't the clean straight lines. As well what would such a development have on the way that other cities were planned as well as the impact on New York's history
The origanal NYC wasn't. Then it burned down and was rebuilt. If you avoid the fire you can probably avoid the rebuild along rationalized lines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_New_York
 
Possibly earlier settlement, resulting in building that was more influenced by the terrain. IIUC there are no rivers or creeks on Manhattan today, nor much in the way of hills, but when settled Manhattan had both including a sizeable river at about 106th St. Perhaps with earlier settlement more stone buildings would be erected by the time of the fire so earlier unplanned buildings and streetscapes would survive.
 
Apparently there were three Great Fires. Manhattan just proved to be unlucky in that regard.
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Back when all light and heat came from flames city fires were common. Chicago, San Francisco are just a couple better known than average.
 
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Back when all light and heat came from flames city fires were common. Chicago, San Francisco are just a couple better known than average.

Still the fire could have been a lot less damaging. Keeping old non-grid design.

This, however, will likely only be kept in the southern tip of the island. As the city expanded northwards and out some form of order was not only necessary but it was also possible; so why wouldn't one plan ahead?

Nevertheless, the design could have been different than OTL's. A less spaced out grid, or square blocks rather than rectangular ones. Two diagonals rather than one, or a star-shaped grid like Washington and Paris with roundabouts could have been possible.

Personally I find it more interesting, to consider Brooklyn's growth and design had the Charter of Greater New York not happened and it remained an independent city. New York and Brooklyn would likely grow as true twin cities each with their independent downtown and financial centers.
 
The oldest part of the city would be considered to have more "character" because of its old-world style layout and would be the butt of jokes about how hard it is to get around in.
 

Meerkat92

Banned
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Back when all light and heat came from flames city fires were common. Chicago, San Francisco are just a couple better known than average.

The rivers didn't help much. As I recall the December ice was too thick for the firemen to break through.
 
The problem is that New York grew in the enlightenment era when even in Europe new cities or quarters were no longer just a motley collection of houses with narrow, winding closes but planned along rational lines. Virtually from the renaissance era onwards new towns were build in a chessbord layout whenever they didn't have medieval quarters or an unfavourable landscape in their way. Look at all the colonial towns in Spanish America, Edinburgh's New Town or Mannheim. After the Great Fire of 1666 even London could have ended up with a rational and decent street layout if either Sir Christopher Wren's or John Evelyn's plan had not been torpedoed by the petty selfish interests of bickering real estate owners.

800px-1768_James_Craig_Map_of_New_Town%2C_Edinburgh%2C_Scotland_%28First_Plan_of_New_Town%29_-_Geographicus_-_Edinburgh-craig-1768.jpg


John_Evelyn%27s_plan_rebuilding_London_Great_Fire_1666.png


Mannheim_1758.jpg
 
More early settlement of Manhattan. Have New Amsterdam grow bigger. Maybe some extra Dutch settlements on the island (for example have New Haarlem become bigger, maybe an extra settlement in Mid Town Manhattan). These settlements were never central planned would thus end up like back home in Europe. The roads connecting these settlements would still be straight but it would probably end up influencing the street pattern of the entire city (more diagonal streets)
 
Awesomely, someone already considered this matter in some detail, and even produced a cool map of what an alt-NYC streetplan might have looked like:

tumblr_mzb2n2LXkk1snchhfo1_1280.jpg


That image compares the 1811 plan (the basis for the OTL grid plan, seen right) with a more 'organic' alternative that might have come into being if the grid approach had been rejected (seen left).

That's the streetplan. As for the atmosphere/character of the city itself: it would obviously be more 'chaotic' and 'disorganized', like many older European cities are. In many ways, that often adds charm. Lots of people still buy into the myth that a fully 'rational' design is better, but when you investigate how 'livable' cities are, it turns out that human scale is a crucial factor. And human scale is better preserved in naturally grown, slightly disorderly cities. In 'rational' grids systems, you can easily end up with streets that feel like concrete canyons, where a cold wind howls and no-one feels at home.
 
I assure you, as someone who lives in NYC, everyone hates the way the West Village isn't on a grid.

Wait... what? Am I missing something? Are you being sarcastic? If not; have you seen a map of the West Village recently? Practically nothing but straight, planned roads! Look at it! Do you honestly believe that's natural development?

Simply compare it to European cities that developed mostly without central planning, like Brussels, Vienna, Zurich, Milan...

And those are examples I picked at random. Most European cities are like that. And those cities have a charm that would be utterly destroyed if someone were to implement a grid system. There's no accounting for taste, but frankly I suspect a city like New York would have been a far more pleasant place without a rigid grid system.

A New York City that gradually developed like a European city, unplanned and unsteered by over-ambitious men, would certainly be a very interesting place. More diverse and surprising than a centrally planned city. Such an alternate world I'd sure like to visit, just to see what it would be like. :cool:
 

Vitruvius

Donor
Wait... what? Am I missing something? Are you being sarcastic? If not; have you seen a map of the West Village recently? Practically nothing but straight, planned roads! Look at it! Do you honestly believe that's natural development?

Simply compare it to European cities that developed mostly without central planning, like Brussels, Vienna, Zurich, Milan...

And those are examples I picked at random. Most European cities are like that. And those cities have a charm that would be utterly destroyed if someone were to implement a grid system. There's no accounting for taste, but frankly I suspect a city like New York would have been a far more pleasant place without a rigid grid system.

A New York City that gradually developed like a European city, unplanned and unsteered by over-ambitious men, would certainly be a very interesting place. More diverse and surprising than a centrally planned city. Such an alternate world I'd sure like to visit, just to see what it would be like. :cool:

I assume he meant it was not on the same grid as the rest of Manhattan. And not to completely disagree but its difficult to make an analogy to Europe. When you consider that the old core, the historic centers of the cities you mention are each about the size of Manhattan below Canal St, or maybe to be generous, Houston St you can't really compare them to the rest of Manhattan, its apples to Oranges. All those cities, just like NYC, experienced massive exponential growth in the later half of the 19th century with the industrial revolution and the massive urbanization that accompanied it. So if you zoom out and look at those cities and the same scale as the whole island of Manhattan, not just lower NY, you will see a similar pattern.

Take Vienna for example. The area inside the Ringstrasse, the old walls of the city, is centuries old. We'll set aside the Rinstrasse itself for moment since the glacis was left vacant until the 1860s. The area outside of the Ringstrasse is considerably more ordered but still somewhat organic, the 'plan' of much of this area dates from the 17th-18th centuries. But look further still past the Gurtel to the area of the 19th century development where the city was built up out of nothing, not overlain upon old Palace grounds or the small rural suburbs of Vienna but upon empty land, like the aforementioned glacis upon which the Ringstrasse was built. This area is all gridded streets. True its not one single overriding grid like Manhattan but a series of grids that parallel and radiate out from the central core. But Manhattan is not a radial city but grew longitudinally up a relatively straight island. At any rate you can see the same pattern of development in nearly every European city. A vaguely rectangular inner core, the old orthogonal Roman Castrum degraded by time and overlain with medieval constructions, then a warren of true medieval streets stretching to the old walls then a slightly more regular often radial out core from the post-Renaissance time and then the vast sprawl of the 19th century city.

And this should not be surprising in many ways its inevitable. Western urban development has a long history of regularly planned cities. Look at the cities of the Greeks, the gird plan of Miletus for example. Or the Roman Castrum, with the fundamental grid parti of Cardo and Decumanus that forms the core of almost every city in Western Europe. Look too at the medieval expansion of the city of Florence during the time of Arnolfo di Cambrio, the his walls dramatically increased the size of the city and the new area was developed with roughly strait streets, some in parallel some radial. Or look at the Florentine new towns like San Giovanni Val d'Arno or their Venetian equivalents like Castelfranco Veneto. All planned on a grid. Then the great burst of activity in the Renaissance and the Baroque cities like Palmanova, Neuf-Brisach, Saarlouis and Karlsruhe to name a few.

The point is rapid development was almost always done a regular plan or with some overriding strategy. The European city's irregular-ness comes from its long history. Development in fits and starts, construction destruction and reconstruction, expansion followed by contraction. So the old Roman plan crumbled and was built over erratically in Medieval times, the new medieval zone declined during the black death and through war and was slowly rebuilt. Someone's vision is only partially executed and then partially destroyed and then rebuilt. This LONG history is what created the palimpsest of the European urban plan. So in short NYC is simply too young and has grown too fast. You can't have the city 'planned' and developed in less than a century in a way or in a manner that would produce the same result as a process that would normally take centuries. That is the antithesis or organic, it would be a conscious decision to plan a city irregularly. An impulse never before demonstrated in the history of Western urbanism. Probably the best you could have is a moderately more organic grid, perhaps fractured into a series of grids that radiate from Broadway or shift angles slightly on different points on the island. Perhaps a bit more like the other boroughs but almost certainly not like an old European city writ large, multiplied 7 or 8 times over across the island.
 
I assume he meant it was not on the same grid as the rest of Manhattan. And not to completely disagree but its difficult to make an analogy to Europe. When you consider that the old core, the historic centers of the cities you mention are each about the size of Manhattan below Canal St, or maybe to be generous, Houston St you can't really compare them to the rest of Manhattan, its apples to Oranges. All those cities, just like NYC, experienced massive exponential growth in the later half of the 19th century with the industrial revolution and the massive urbanization that accompanied it. So if you zoom out and look at those cities and the same scale as the whole island of Manhattan, not just lower NY, you will see a similar pattern.

Take Vienna for example. The area inside the Ringstrasse, the old walls of the city, is centuries old. We'll set aside the Rinstrasse itself for moment since the glacis was left vacant until the 1860s. The area outside of the Ringstrasse is considerably more ordered but still somewhat organic, the 'plan' of much of this area dates from the 17th-18th centuries. But look further still past the Gurtel to the area of the 19th century development where the city was built up out of nothing, not overlain upon old Palace grounds or the small rural suburbs of Vienna but upon empty land, like the aforementioned glacis upon which the Ringstrasse was built. This area is all gridded streets. True its not one single overriding grid like Manhattan but a series of grids that parallel and radiate out from the central core. But Manhattan is not a radial city but grew longitudinally up a relatively straight island. At any rate you can see the same pattern of development in nearly every European city. A vaguely rectangular inner core, the old orthogonal Roman Castrum degraded by time and overlain with medieval constructions, then a warren of true medieval streets stretching to the old walls then a slightly more regular often radial out core from the post-Renaissance time and then the vast sprawl of the 19th century city.

And this should not be surprising in many ways its inevitable. Western urban development has a long history of regularly planned cities. Look at the cities of the Greeks, the gird plan of Miletus for example. Or the Roman Castrum, with the fundamental grid parti of Cardo and Decumanus that forms the core of almost every city in Western Europe. Look too at the medieval expansion of the city of Florence during the time of Arnolfo di Cambrio, the his walls dramatically increased the size of the city and the new area was developed with roughly strait streets, some in parallel some radial. Or look at the Florentine new towns like San Giovanni Val d'Arno or their Venetian equivalents like Castelfranco Veneto. All planned on a grid. Then the great burst of activity in the Renaissance and the Baroque cities like Palmanova, Neuf-Brisach, Saarlouis and Karlsruhe to name a few.

The point is rapid development was almost always done a regular plan or with some overriding strategy. The European city's irregular-ness comes from its long history. Development in fits and starts, construction destruction and reconstruction, expansion followed by contraction. So the old Roman plan crumbled and was built over erratically in Medieval times, the new medieval zone declined during the black death and through war and was slowly rebuilt. Someone's vision is only partially executed and then partially destroyed and then rebuilt. This LONG history is what created the palimpsest of the European urban plan. So in short NYC is simply too young and has grown too fast. You can't have the city 'planned' and developed in less than a century in a way or in a manner that would produce the same result as a process that would normally take centuries. That is the antithesis or organic, it would be a conscious decision to plan a city irregularly. An impulse never before demonstrated in the history of Western urbanism. Probably the best you could have is a moderately more organic grid, perhaps fractured into a series of grids that radiate from Broadway or shift angles slightly on different points on the island. Perhaps a bit more like the other boroughs but almost certainly not like an old European city writ large, multiplied 7 or 8 times over across the island.

Good points, very good points indeed. I agree completely. In this case, however, I was literally going with the OPs proposal: an 'unplanned' NYC. Even the 19th century development of European cities was mostly planned, though less rigidly than a city like New York. Without any planning at all, I imagine things would be different.

Is a completely unplanned NYC likely? No, not really. But I'd sure like to see it. ;)

Anyway, what you describe (Manhattan being more like the city's other Boroughs) seems a believable outcome.
 
Awesomely, someone already considered this matter in some detail, and even produced a cool map of what an alt-NYC streetplan might have looked like:

*snip* (too large, don't quote)

That image compares the 1811 plan (the basis for the OTL grid plan, seen right) with a more 'organic' alternative that might have come into being if the grid approach had been rejected (seen left).

That's the streetplan. As for the atmosphere/character of the city itself: it would obviously be more 'chaotic' and 'disorganized', like many older European cities are. In many ways, that often adds charm. Lots of people still buy into the myth that a fully 'rational' design is better, but when you investigate how 'livable' cities are, it turns out that human scale is a crucial factor. And human scale is better preserved in naturally grown, slightly disorderly cities. In 'rational' grids systems, you can easily end up with streets that feel like concrete canyons, where a cold wind howls and no-one feels at home.

Very interesting.
Once in a while, I suggested a "Mannahatta Metro" challenge for the Map of the Fortnight contest line, even suggesting it to be a monther.
This grid really makes it worth it.
 
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