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One of my favorite examples of a planned city is Canberra, the capital of Australia. Canberra’s design was the result of a winning entry in an architectural contest. Walter Burley Griffin, an American architect, couldn’t believe his luck when he was informed that his design, hurried together while on his honeymoon in 1911, had been selected and that he would have a chance to build a city from the ground up. As shown in Figure 13, the organization of the city is almost crystalline in impression, with a long central axis linking perfect sightlines of a war memorial and the parliament buildings. The street plan is filled with radial symmetry, and the center is cut through with a large artificial lake whose original plan called for tight geometric lines but was modified to provide some welcome relief to the mind by including flowing, organic shorelines.

Figure 13
: The planned city of Canberra, easy to navigate but lacking in character

Canberra is a city of stark, geometric beauty with such perfect visual alignment that one’s breath quickens in response to the sheer audacity of the design, but my own impression when I visited was
that there was something sterile and slightly artificial about the space. I felt myself to be a visitor in a giant urban museum piece rather than in the living, breathing crucible of life that we normally expect to find in a city. My occasion for visiting was to deal with some minor administrative matters at an embassy, and I couldn’t help feeling that the form of the city was perfectly in accord with my business there. I negotiated the wide, empty streets in my rental car with little difficulty, found the office I was looking for without delay, and, once my business was completed, I found few reasons to linger.

When cities build slowly, over thousands of years, some interesting commonalities emerge that show urban spaces as reflecting pools for the shape of the human mind. Hillier’s group has noticed that most cities grow in similar ways, taking on a shape that they describe as a “deformed wheel” in which the central core of the city is connected to the periphery by a series of spokes with high integration values. This pattern is easily visible in London, Rome, and Tokyo and, with a bit of scrutiny, can be found in almost all city maps. Figures 14 and 15 show the deformed wheel organization of London and Tokyo, with shading indicating the depth of integration of individual streets.

Figure 14
: London’s density forms the hub of a “deformed wheel”

Figure 15
: Tokyo shows the same type of “deformed wheel” shape as London

Not only is this growth pattern the best way to promote continued contact between the central core and the periphery as the city increases in size, but it also makes large cities more intelligible to support good wayfinding. Hillier argues that this deformed wheel organization is driven in part by economic forces that favor minimizing distances between markets and buyers, and in part by the organization of our minds, especially the premium that is placed on viewpoints and vistas. Hillier contrasts his approach to understanding how cities grow with older methods based on concepts of mass and gravitational attraction. Such schemes suggest that places in cities are arranged in accordance with a system of attractive forces between individuals, groups, and institutions. Large institutions or social groups within a city space attract individuals as surely as the asteroid belt orbits the sun. In contrast, Hillier’s space syntax approach is “light based rather than mass based … reflect[ing] the world we see rather than the world of distance and mass.” In Hillier’s scheme, it is not the unseen social forces of human networks of power that drive people through a space, but what attracts the eye.
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Though most cities that have grown through gradual organic processes rather than through top-down planning show Hillier’s spoke-and-wheel organization, it is obvious that there are enormous individual differences between cities, many of which are related to culture. One of the joys of world travel for me has always been the jarring confrontations with city plans that don’t conform to the North American linear grid that I’ve grown up with.

On a recent visit to Beijing, I set out one morning to find a small museum. When I arrived at what I thought was the right address, I entered the building and began to look for exhibits. I encountered
an elderly woman standing before an open fire stirring a pot. I tried to speak to her in Mandarin sounded out from a phrase book, but to no avail. My mouth became dry and I began to sweat. Without the ability to communicate verbally, I looked around for spatial clues as to the nature of the room that I stood in and the building that enclosed it.

The relationships of open and closed spaces resembled little that I had seen before. I had no spatial cultural reference. It took considerable effort for me to understand that I had stumbled into a private residence and not a museum. This is a small example of a general truth. When we embed ourselves in foreign cultures, the strangeness of how built space is used is just as disorienting as an inability to understand the local language. In Beijing, there were times when it was difficult for me to distinguish residence from business, or even residence from sidewalk—some dwellings appeared to consist of nothing more than a cloth awning stretched out over a sidewalk or even a roadway, with a cooking pot over an open fire constituting a kitchen, and some rolled blankets arranged around the outside of the canopy serving as bedrooms. Variations in spatial culture are not always so extreme, but they are persistent and often easy to spot.

Hillier has used the city of Nicosia in Cyprus as an example of the influence of culture on space. Like many cities, Nicosia contains separate ethnic enclaves. The Greek settlement has a rough linear grid of streets with high integration that would not look out of place in North America. The Turkish settlement, with low integration, short streets, and low intelligibility, is typical of many Muslim town plans.
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Such plans are meant to steer visitors toward a few well-specified public areas and away from residential areas, and generally to encourage privacy and to discourage co-presence. These differences show that there is an interaction between our cognition of
space, the manner in which the arrangement of space sculpts our movements and our behavior, and the requirements of a particular culture.
All
human beings are affected by the organization of space in similar ways, and we can use this generalization about our minds to organize our movements in ways coherent with cultural values. Skilled architects and designers can bring people together or keep them apart with the same precision that a skilled potter employs to make a jug designed to mete out single drops of precious oil.

As cities grow, one of the main constraints acting on their form is the ease with which residents can get from one place to another. The deformed wheel suggests that one way to promote such ease is through artful design of the meshwork of streets, but in modern times this can take us only so far. As urban populations have increased to staggering numbers, we have found it necessary to seek ways to conquer space by cheating time. We have learned to move more quickly.

There can be no doubt that the advent of the internal combustion engine has had more impact on the shapes of our cities than any other single development in the last thousand years. The rules of spatial cognition don’t change—indeed, space syntax studies have shown that we can predict the movements of cars with the same precision that we can foresee the movements of people. The same tools that help us to improve the Tate Gallery or fill a public square with pedestrians can also predict how cars will move in urban street plans. But cars change the scale of cities dramatically. One rule of thumb among urban planners is that people will walk when their goals are located less than a five-minute stroll from their houses. Though the exact number or distance (sometimes referred to as a walkshed) may be a subject of
debate, and may vary depending on the demographics and motivations of the walkers, one thing is abundantly clear: a driveshed is much larger than a walkshed. This is not only because cars move much more quickly than pedestrians but also because driving is almost effortless compared with walking. Provided that it is easy for us to climb into a car, and provided that the layout of streets makes it practicable for us to get around at a reasonable speed, we are willing to tolerate vastly exaggerated distances between our homes, our places of employment, and the locations of services and stores that contribute to our happy lives. Although rapid transport using both private cars and public transportation systems has made it possible to accommodate huge numbers of people in urban settings (worldwide, there are more than 300 cities with populations exceeding one million people and a handful of cities with populations in excess of 10 million), it has transformed the nature of the city and given rise to a plethora of difficult problems, many seemingly without any reasonable solution.

From the spatial perspective, rapid transit by whatever means requires that cities be able to work at simultaneous but wildly different scales. While cars hurtle along expressways and wide multilane thoroughfares and trains filled with commuting workers plow through subterranean tunnels, many of the pedestrians whose needs have not changed much in a millennium are still wandering the sidewalks at street level. Accommodating the needs of travelers with such different spatial scales, and providing a streetscape that works for all, has been one of the most vexing problems ever confronted by those who try to plan cities.

Downtown areas work best when there is high density of use by pedestrians, yet if the pedestrians have no means of getting around in the city, they obviously cannot contribute to density of use. Though rapid transit should be one solution to this problem, it
is not a panacea. For one thing, most types of rapid transit systems are enormously expensive and must be paid for from the public coffers. Furthermore, it can be very difficult to coax people out of their cars and into buses and trains. Many of us climb into a car for a daily drive to work even though using available public transit would be less expensive for us and, in many cases, require less effort. Many people end up parking their cars in lots that are much farther from their workplaces than the closest public transit stop.