ABSTRACT
This chapter examines emergence-convergence in American cities. It focuses on two contemporary American cities primarily characterized by large-scale orthogonal super grids: metropolitan Chicago, Illinois and Las Vegas, Nevada. The chapter presents a 'strip effect' along the prime activity axes or capital routes of these two American cities. It argues that subtle differences between emergent spatial structure in Chicago and in Las Vegas, despite both possessing a large-scale orthogonal super grid, which is the material manifestation of the national grid system imposed by the 1785 Land Ordinance. Both cities demonstrate particular approaches to conserving the primacy of the center in the form of the CBD/historical area by varying street length and connections in a manner consistent with regular grid planning principles. In 1972, the city was the focus of a seminal study in Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour.
