Went this morning to a lecture in a course on the cultural history of Melbourne being taught in the history department at Melbourne Uni. (I met the lecturer by chance last week and he told me about it.) I didn't learn much I hadn't at least guessed along the way - it is a survey course - but it was such fun to be back in a classroom! Even hearing the announce- ments and the description of methods for research projects made me happy. I miss teaching!Among Australian cities, Melbourne is famous for its grid, laid out by a man named Hoddle in 1837. The above is one of the surveyor's chains he used in marking out the blocks. Originally there were to be twenty four big square blocks, 3 by 8, barely bisected by narrow lanes allowing the backdoor provisioning of the houses and businesses fronting the main streets.
It's nothing like as big as New York's grid in 1821, but still striking for its ambition. (You could, I suppose, see the gridding of the whole island of Manhattan as an act not of ambition but of laziness - just keep the lines going until you reach water!) Both imagined cities far grander than what was already there or could be extrapolated from it.The thing about grids is you don't know how they'll fill out, or even if. By laying out a grid rather than a system with centers or letting the lay of the land carve out your spaces you leave it to the future to shape your city, maximizing in advance the possibilities of communication and movement between sections. (Hoddle had no way of knowing that the city would basically grow along the north-south grid - diagonal in his picture -, leaving the now CBD stranded on a permanent tilt.) The uncertainty is intoxicating and terrifying... and the only thing certain is the uncertainty, for the communication and movement doesn't stop when the grid fills up but just gets more energetic.
Rather like if you planned to write a book with seven chapters, each divided into four subsections, and hoped that each of the twenty-eight resulting blocks would be equally interesting - or at least equally easy to fill - long before you knew who would be moving in...!
