ABSTRACT
The supergrid histories of Xi'an and Nanjing provide strong evidence of the importance of walls and gates as key structural elements, and together they represent the case for road networks being designed as complementary to wall-and-gate structures in China. The wall-and-gate structure appears consistently in both cities as fractal patterns, reflecting directly Chinese wall-oriented spatial practice within a broader Eastern predisposition to areal and multi-directional spatial thinking. Xi'an and Nanjing have both been capitals of China on more than a dozen occasions over a period of almost two millennia. Superblocks are defined by the supergrid as distinct and self-contained units. The two superblocks for detailed study are Jinyuan, Xi'an and Daguangli, Najing. Movements and flows are fed from the gates of walled residential, company, educational, and other institutional compounds onto internal streets or tree-structured glocal streets and onto the supergrid.
