Back in the grid

My flight home took me over the North Sea, Greenland, and Nunavut Canada. We left Frankfurt around 1pm and got into Seattle at 1pm local time - a nine hour flight over nine time zones. It was the day after the winter solstice, so as we went up into the Arctic Circle even though it was still 1pm there it was dusk - on my side of the plane at least, with an unending dawn on the other. The barren, icy peaks and smooth glaciers of Greenland had an eerie blue glow to them in this midday twilight.

Once we got down into the settled part of Canada I noticed something that signaled I had returned to North America. We were flying over vast forests speckled with lake and through it were roads running in confident straight lines across the land, intersecting one another at right angles.

This grid of country roads extends south into my home state and covers most of the continent north of Mexico. On the USA side of the border it is based on Public Land Survey system, which organized the entire country east of the Appalachians into townships of 36 square miles each. This grid made the administration and transfer of land easy for bureaucrats, boosters and settlers based hundreds or thousands of miles away. 

The organization of land based on abstract models is characteristic of powerful governments expanding into new territory. It prioritizes large-scale organizational efficiency over local decisions based on topography, resources and networks. In Europe it can be seen in some Greek colonies, Roman army camps and cities, and Renaissance expansions to old medieval towns. In the America's you can see it in both the cities of the Aztecs and of the Spanish, and much later in the cities of the Anglo settlers of the United States and Canada. At the grandest scale, the invention of latitude and longitude to mark out precise coordinates on the globe applied a grid to the entire world. 

As far as I know however, the creation of the Public Land Survey in the USA was the earliest use of such an abstract organizational system for land settlement at the continental scale. Settlements still arose at strategic locations based on natural features and connections to other settlements, but these new settlements could share orientation and arrangement with cities and towns hundreds of miles away. Most American towns have the federal government in their DNA.

As the country was populated and cities sprawled, the 36 square-mile sections of each township became the organizing structure of new settlements. "Section-line roads" followed the paths of least bureaucratic resistance from growing towns and cities - the coarse grid formed by these thoroughfares provided the minimum network necessary for postwar suburban developments.

The creation of a built environment based on a continent spanning matrix and filled in by profit-seeking enterprises often gives the populated American landscape a particular feeling of blandness and meaninglessness. It is this emptiness that has motivated a new generation to seek out authenticity wherever they can find it, and to seek to create places that have some kind of meaning. The challenge is great because the large-scale systems which generated our sprawling everytowns have been refined and strengthened over the years. It has been a thrilling and experience to travel to Europe and be in places that are much older, that came together slowly, through the decisions of many individuals based on collective wisdom and the observations of the particular circumstance. It is very good to be home, but it is unnerving to find myself once more in the grid.