The reasonable network adapts itself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to itself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable network.1
The physical location of network infrastructure is one of the most permanent decisions cities make
The reasonable network adapts itself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to itself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable network.1
The physical location of network infrastructure is one of the most permanent decisions cities make. The Cardo Maximus in the old city of Jerusalem is still a main north-south shopping street, constructed when Emporer Hadrian rebuilt the city in the 130s CE.
A street right-of-way, once created is seldom destroyed. A segment of that infrastructure is designed to be optimal at a moment of time, with a particular land use (either the realized development of today or an imagined place of tomorrow), enmeshed within a particular network context of all the other nodes and links, compatible with a particular technology. That it functions at all when land use, networks, and technologies change radically, as they do over centuries, is testament to the general flexibility inherent in networks. But the implication is that if it is optimal for the world in which it was designed, it is unlikely to be optimal as that world changes.
Some adaptations do occur. Streets designed for horses were adapted for streetcars (trams) and bicycles and cars and buses and pedestrians.
Still, it may be the best that can be done. Embedded infrastructure, the dictionary example of sunk costs,2 cannot adapt much to the world around them. Instead we expect the world to adapt to the infrastructure.
Following Shaw, we might say such infrastructures are `unreasonable’, in that they cannot be reasoned with.
Many, if not most, planned cities have been laid out with a network of streets “with the sombre sadness of right-angles,” as Jules Verne, quoting Victor Hugo, described the American grid in Salt Lake City, of streets at 90-degree angles to each other, in his classic road trip story: Around the World in 80 Days. Street grids don’t plan themselves, so while all street grids were planned, not all plans result in street grids.
Organically developed3 cities are often more naturalistic, radial cities, with streets feeding the city from the hinterlands, allowing more than 4-directions of entry. All roads lead to Rome, as the saying goes. The Romans themselves were a bit adverse to this organic radial system once they got their own growth machine going, laying out encampments and new settlements on the grid system. The radial system leading to and from the town would bend once it reached the town gates. But as cities themselves were generally not conceived of as whole, but rather themselves emerged, 