ABSTRACT
Social historians have noted that in practice the experience of the sea has provided concepts, technologies, modes of perception, and political frameworks that organize our living on the land. Describing one of the more decisive transformations of sixteenth-century Western Europe-the process by which the town overtook the country in terms of its economic and practical weight-urban historian Henri Lefebvre notes that:
this was the point at which the town was conceptualized, when representations of space derived from the experience of river and sea voyages were applied to urban reality. The town was given written form-described graphically. Bird’s eye views and (maps) proliferated. (Lefebvre 1991: 269)
Lefebvre draws our attention to the bird’s eye view which, he claims, allowed for a particular sort of abstract space to take hold architecturally on a wide scale in the creation of modern urban space. It is easy to see how this aspect of the sea-its apparent homogeneity and the visual technologies that arose to striate it with lines of longitude and latitude in preparation of navigating its “no-man’s-land,”—might be engaged in the production of modern urban planning. The rise of the gridded city and the metaphorical view of the land as an abstract expanse may well be indebted to the maritime experience of a striated sea, what Lefebvre calls abstract space.
