ABSTRACT

A flood of designs followed the devastating fire destroying the timber City of London in September 1666, a fact that did not escape a contemporary theatrical expression; Sir Positive At-all, a character of Thomas Shadwell’s comedy The Sullen Lovers, had seventeen of them all designed by himself. Five of these designs survive: John Evelyn’s and Christopher Wren’s vistas and nodes, Valentine Knight’s and Robert Hooke’s generic open-ended grids, and Richard Newcourt’s hierarchical enclosed grid; together, they captured an intriguing moment in the history of urban planning ideas. The designs contested ideas of the city at the dawn of modernity; here, the consequences of science and trade are mixed together with visions of the Platonic revival of the Renaissance, Baroque verbosity and obscurism, and vestiges of traditions tracing back to much earlier periods. They contextualized and speculated on the possibility of a new kind of transparent city, largely grounded in market or scientific principles rather than those of centralized power. Through the inherent accessibility of the market or scientific principles as well as their implied hygienic and safety improvements, these speculations tentatively redefined London as a target; London changed from a traditional target of siege and pillage to a modern target of systemic damage. Perhaps the irony of London being wiped out twice in 2 years (the Plague and the Fire), not by enemy siege and pillage but by systemic damages in the forms of bacterial growth and chemical reaction, had finally inspired the thoughts that it was time to re-imagine the enemies of the city and its status as a target. This chapter builds a context of the development of urban thinking leading to this crucial moment in the history of cities, explains the design strategies of the five proposals for London and considers the implications of these designs and the fact that none of them was realized. The chapter argues that, in the Western urban tradition, city development has been driven by a unique force for exposure, a quality of urban space deeply connected to an intellectual formulation first established in the ancient Greek polis. These proposals captured a moment when the emergence of modern science gave the moral and aesthetic drive for exposure a new physical and urban reality. As a consequence, the elevated and exposed site of the acropolis was later replaced by a number of other city forms such as gridiron patterns and zoning that emerged as they contested with other demands of the city: defence, social hierarchies, landownership and security. For centuries, the imaginations of the ‘exposed city’ – visibility and speed as desirable urban traits – have shaped countless designs of cities. The edge of the city is one interesting space that embodied this change; traditionally, many cities took walls, moats and gates as their most powerful defences; over many centuries, the edge of the city has been modified from the hard walls and moats to soft signage and tollgates, and has recently transformed itself into interactive electronic screens, dramatically shifting our perception of fundamental concepts of space and time. 1 Here, the pedestrian, the horse, the motored vehicle and the electronic signal all shaped their own versions of transparency of the city.