The World's Most Hyperstimulating Cities (and How They Hyperstimulate)
Or "Spatial Logic a-Go-Go in A Major"
Looking through Henry Oliver’s excellent Substack a week or so after Christmas, I came across a piece summarising his read-through of Jane Glover’s Mozart in Italy. The thesis of the book, Henry suggested, could be summed up as ‘how Mozart became Mozart’.
The third of the points in his summary was entitled History Made Real.
“Mozart toured many historical sites in Italy. Pompeii was being uncovered. He stepped right into the past. Seeing the artefacts and being in the rooms where the legends he read about had occurred immersed his imagination. Glover calls the depiction of history and myth and real and human a hallmark of Mozart’s opera.”
This struck me as a new angle on a composer I’ve spent a long time studying and thinking about. It stirred me to comment:
The ability to live life among symbols of a monumental history seems to be a considerable source of Italy's superabundance of creative energy - Goethe noted in his Italian Journey that while in Germany the classical past had to be reconstructed from manuscript and lithographs, in Rome you were immersed in it ambiently by dint of wandering past the Forum on the way to buy vegetables at the local market. Rome is hyperstimulating to the same degree that New York or Seoul is, but in a far more nourishing and organic way.
If you hang out in the sort of places where people talk, you’ll know that people talk a lot about cities and urban planning. The conversations are generally of a quantitative bent — restating straightforward economic truisms about the impact of housing supply on house prices, and the impact of planning regulation and zoning on housing supply, and the impact of all of this on homelessness and paths of accession to the propertied reaches of the middle class, a swirl of causation-chasing that forms the ever-circuited quest for that most elusive of cryptids: the ideal of mixed-used urbanism. It exists, just not wherever you are right now, just as the Great American Novel is whichever one (or, indeed, all) of the perennial candidates you’re not presently reading.
Discussing urbanism, and inevitably concluding that the best hope for humanity in the city is an increase in high-density housing stock and cycle lanes, is worthy and interesting, but tiresome; there’s not enough distance between the ‘back’ and the ‘forth’ in the argument. And then I saw a visualisation that changed the way I think about all of this.
The image above, which details the degree to which different cities are structured with orthogonal street layouts (from the highly right-angled at the top to the all-over-the-place at the bottom) is from a paper called Urban spatial order: street network orientation, configuration, and entropy by Geoff Boeing. The thrust of the paper is that “the configurations and orientations [of a city’s streets] help define a city’s spatial logic and order.”
“This study examines street network orientation, configuration, and entropy in 100 cities around the world using OpenStreetMap data and OSMnx. It measures the entropy of street bearings in weighted and unweighted network models, along with each city’s typical street segment length, average circuity, average node degree, and the network’s proportions of four-way intersections and dead-ends”
What this is reducible to, in a form by which humans instinctively understand it, is the feel of the urban fabric — why, apart (though perhaps not too far) from language and weather, Hanoi ‘feels’ very different to Washington, and why Manhattan ‘feels’ very different to London.
Coming across this paper, I was reminded of my comment under Henry’s article, and of my lack of interest in urbanism arguments. Gratis of the paper, both notions were unified, and by this reunion my aversion to the latter was finally given concise explanation: I find the urbanism talk dull because it seems so uninterested itself in what makes a city worth living in beyond very worthwhile questions of accessibility. We live in a time whose intellectual tenor seeks to reduce most things to challenges that can be solved with improved systematisation. But cities are more than the way they are laid out. It is impossible to ignore that cities are the most wondrous and dynamic exhibition of what is great in humanity; and yet, for all that, I feel that this is something that is still somewhat underrated in most loose talk about this subject. There is a form of stimulation, of hyperstimulation, available in urban environments that is only available there; just as cities represent the only form of culture that one can completely live in, they also represent the only kind of stimulation that is so powerful as to be transformative. It is not for nothing that the kernel of youth points, magnetised, towards the metropolis, and we chapterise our lives by the cities (or the parts of them) that we live in.
This got me thinking about the most hyperstimulating urban environments in my encounter; what I consider makes those cities hyperstimulating; and how those patterns of perceived hyperstimulation map onto the conclusions reached in papers like Boeing’s. If we’re thinking about how to improve the way urban environments are fashioned, and given the scale of the increase in global urban expansion we can expect between now and 2050, I should think we ought to push as much thought in the direction of how we maximise the urban-stimulant-factor as we do to any other aspect of the topic. As centres of human intellectual and cultural productivity, making them properly conducive to these activities is in our interest.
A Word on Spatial Logic
Before we go walking/talking around a few cities, first a deeper dive into Boeing’s paper and the thought behind it.
Boeing’s measurement of spatial logic in different cities is aimed at understanding cities as oriented networks, constructed and planned for specific purposes.
A city’s development eras, design paradigms, underlying terrain, culture, and local economic conditions influence the pattern, topology, and grain of its street net- works (Jackson 1985; Kostof 1991).
And, as Boeing goes on to note, “…these networks in turn structure the human interactions and transportation processes that run along them, forming an important pillar of city planners’ quest for spatial order”, while informing the personas and dispositions of their respective populations. This has an important bearing on what scholars of urbanism refer to as ‘entropy’. Quoted in Howard’s Entropy: A New World Order, Jeremy Rifkin discussed entropy in the context of cities’ main problems, and their common origin:
“The massive energy inputs required to sustain contemporary city life, the entropy of the urban environment is rising dramatically to the point where the continued existence of urbanization is being called into question.”
For his part, Boeing’s definition of entropy accords to the conventions of his field — entropy as the “disorder, uncertainty and dispersion” produced by cities with high numbers of ‘edges’, edges which, colloquially put, are a quantification of the randomness with which a city’s streets are laid. Cities with logical, orthogonal layouts, with streets that run in fewer compass point directions, with fewer intersections and dead-ends, have fewer edges and are less entropic. Cities with wild, accretive layouts, with lots of little nooks and crannies and little central planning, have more edges and more entropy. However, as we are shortly to find out, where the term ‘high entropy’ might summon up connotations of high waste, cities with more entropic layouts do not necessarily default to worse economic outcomes; and high entropy may even positively correlate with our highly unsystematic impression of what makes a city hyperstimulating.
Boeing connects entropy to urban planning norms by coining a new measure, the orientation-order (‘φ’), used “to quantify the extent to which a street network follows the spatial ordering logic of a single grid.” As will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the subject, America’s cities, which are by and large newer and have been founded more systematically than incidentally, conform more exactly to the grid structure on average than their global counterparts.
As Boeing puts it — drawing on impressions recorded by many of his forebears — “the grid has been used to express political power, promote military rule, improve cadastral legibility, foster egalitarianism, and encourage land speculation and development.” But what does it all mean in terms of a city’s economic potential, and its potential to steal our hearts away and flood our minds with notions of limitless possibility?
Seoul
I’ve never been to Tokyo, which sits further up in Boeing’s orthogonality matrix than one might have guessed, but I have spent a fair amount of time in Seoul — it is, among the newer metropoli, an exemplary hyperstimulating environment.
The root of Seoul’s urban-stimulant-factor is in the constant play of contrasts within which it immerses the citygoer. Positioned, and made a capital of, for its defensible military qualities, Seoul is simultaneously extremely urbanised and extremely natural. What makes Seoul’s particular capabilities in hyperstimulation so distinct is the way in which monumental examples of Korean history and deep modernism are perfectly harmonised to each other. In most cities where remnants of an historical past sit up alongside gestures to more contemporary urbanism, a different kind of entropy can typically be seen — Arnheim Rudolf’s entropy, which he defines as a clash of orders, “where disorder is not the absence of all order but rather the clash of uncoordinated orders”. To Rudolf, entropy of this kind is a token of an absence of progress, for in the clash of orders is proof of the failure of one order to make itself the proper successor to another — “a revolution must aim at the destruction of the given order and will succeed only by asserting an order of its own.”
Seeing this kind of contrast (as you can in, for instance, modern Athens) typically produces a deadening feeling, whereby one regrets the fallenness of what’s no longer there, and then further regrets the taste of those who erected what is there now. In Seoul, though, where the 14th century gate of Sungnyemun (one of the six of the Great Gates of Seoul that remain standing) is made a circus by rings of traffic, there is little feeling of incongruity, nor is there much when one looks up Sejong-daero (that’s a street, flanked with skyscrapers) at Gyeongbokgung Palace.
There is some kind of ancestral aesthetic sense that unites the superficial disparities between the way Seoul presents itself — a pronounced feeling of historical continuity between the high Hadidisms of Dongdaemun Design Plaza and the splendour of the old Fortress Wall. Indeed, a marker of South Korea as a whole is the way in which it appears to sit at ease with its history, however explosive its recent chapters have been. Perhaps this is a legacy of its Confucianism, which has likewise helped maintain the distinction and vigour of Chinese culture through centuries of vulnerability to conquest.
That same stimulation-by-contrast is evident in the frequency and spiritedness with which untrammelled nature steals in between the concrete. On the slopes of Jung-gu, with its famous lookout, Seoul stretches until its furthest expanse is mixed with the hills, but even up at that lookout, surrounded on all sides by the city, the city itself seems nothing more than a distant tide lapping against the greenery that carpets this mountain oasis. Canals grooved into the cityscape are lined with trees. In no other urban environment which has enjoyed a growth as rapid and accretive as Seoul’s can I remember encountering nature as delicate, nor anywhere can I recall the hyperstimulation of neon displays that make the pavement panoramic giving way as suddenly to the hyperstimulation of a steep mountainside up whose flighty stairways couples scramble in the low lamplight. One does not expect to find the financial district of a global megacity to be among its most serene and beautifully situated regions, and yet that is precisely the feeling pervasive in Yeouido, as you can see in the video above.
Seoul is among the least orthogonally-planned, and most edge-rich, of the major metropoli. Since the 1960s it has abound by the conventional developmental stages of: post-war restoration; concentration and dispersal; City Beautiful-redevelopment; and now further re-planning for greening and pedestrian friendliness. Prior to this it evolved largely by accretion. It was only during Japanese occupation, during which time the city was known as Kyŏngsŏng, that Seoul was entreated to its first formal urban planning process, in 1934. Even then, the lack of a unified organising voice on the part of either the Japanese occupiers, or Korea’s subsequent American patrons, meant that development maintained its organic and relatively anarchic path.
As a decidedly non-orthogonal city, a great amount of Seoul’s stimulant quality comes in the fact that its daily culture, and a considerable part of its economic activity, is mostly expressed in the alleyway. Restaurant and pub culture is vibrant in Seoul, and Korea as a whole. A fifth of Koreans eat out at least once per day, and the majority eat out at least once every three days. Where there are just over 45,000 pubs in the UK, a nation whose culture is synonymous with the pub, with a ratio of a pub per 1413 residents, South Korea has around 115,000, with a ratio of a bar or pub for every 45 residents. Constant concentrated activity around bars and eateries (usually found squeezed into narrow streets and embedded into neighbourhoods), the associated constancy of ambient marketing as the establishments mount their constant duels for your attention, and the associated behavioural conditioning performed by regular well-dining and drinking (frequently to excess), means that, while Seoul is phenomenally stimulating at scale, it also commands an urban energy that remains highly concentrated at street, and indeed neighbourhood, level.
Delhi
Delhi is perhaps the most relentlessly stimulating urban environment through which I’ve ever ventured. As someone who, as the tone of this article ought to suggest, relishes the intensity of the city environment, Delhi is so intense along so many axes as to be an outrage.
On my first day there, my now-wife took me to the market you see above — Chandni Chowk, beloved of many a local, where tourist presence is sparse. The primary thoroughfare is loomed over by the magnificent helm of the Red Fort. In the relentless footfall, Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib, one of the nine historic gurdwaras of Delhi, sometimes appears partly submerged. The shops that line the main drag and rise in terrace above it contain wedding- and daily wearable finery the plenty of which you have never seen. Along its side-streets, wide enough for two pairs of shoulders to pass, autos and mopeds vie to get by one another, and pulled-carts compete, driving walkers into the open fronts of the shops for refuge. A canopy of cabling lays overhead, upon which macaques run. Indian foods, better than any version of the same dish you might have tasted elsewhere, fall out of the walls, and one must be extremely discerning as to which walls one is willing to accept such subsidy from. Stricken or water-logged tourists must either leave the labyrinth for the refuge of a restaurant, if there’s time, or get a shop-boy to lead them to a hole in a wall whence one can piss. Sometimes the hole in the wall to which one is led is not so much a hole in the wall as a divet in a building’s foundation. To be led here on one’s first day in Delhi was an exhilaration and an appalling sensory cruelty.
The scents are, in some ways, what I remember most when I think of Chandni Chowk (apart from the undercurrent of tooting horn, and that unspeakable polluted air that blackened the inside of my nose, on which more shortly). As anywhere else in the city, scents sweet and foul co-mingle superbly, with the former generally edging the contest. Appropriately for this uneven mix, multidimensional poverty has increased in some districts in Delhi while decreasing in others, and decreasing slightly on the whole, which poverty is another arm of Delhi’s urban stimulant factor.
Because few other cities which I’ve visited are apt to serve up so many sights that desolate the visitor’s emotions as Delhi. As part of their journey home, schoolgirls no older than 10 with their braided hair walk on the median of a three-lane motorway, on which same median one might see a man asleep when passing back the same way later on. In the auburn smog of the morning your taxi driver, driving always with his window partly down, coughs, and you begin to wonder how being a cabbie in Delhi, exposed always to its air, must harm one’s life expectancy. A boy performs circus tricks for a passenger in an expensive-looking car stopped at a light, which passenger might then roll down a window and toss a few rupees into the street, which the boy must bend down in the oncoming traffic to pick up. Your own car runs alongside a broad verge next to a bypass, and your eye is caught by a splendid purple scarf flung in canopy across two saplings. By it, some clothes, a saree and a kurta or two, are hung on a line that has been strung between two other small trees. And, under the canopy, there’s a gas cooker; and some shoes. You quickly realise that within this snapshot you have taken full inventory of all the possessions someone owns, someone absent and gone off to try and find their bread. This is someone’s house. They live there.
It is at this stage that one starts to think that, in cities like Delhi, conventional notions of being able to measure urban entropy by means of edges cease to apply. In Delhi, lives are lived, and business done, on the street, and in the street, and in places where no streets even exist, and whose edge identity thereby cannot be measured.
Indeed, Delhi is particularly interesting on account of the fact that it is an instance in which its natural sensory hyperstimulation goes to make interesting suggestions about the relationship between urban planning, urban health outcomes, the progress of the upwardly-mobile member of the working class into the middle class. The following passage, written about Taipei, lays 1-to-1 upon Delhi (as I imagine it would of Marakesh):
"In the market you never know what you might find. The dense and mazelike market topography encourages something akin to a 'random-access' distribution of populations and tradable items, maximizing the number of encounters, or opportunities for transaction. Crowds meander with a quasi-brownian motion as they eat, shop, talk, meet, pass through and wander around, continuously redirected by the intermingling traffic/traffick for its own sake that constitutes the real life of the city.”
This is the precise opposite of the orthogonal, logically planned philosophy of urban planning that dominates the upper reaches of Boeing’s chart. An apostle of low-entropy urban planning might instinctively argue that it is the abundance of edges (and, indeed, life and business beyond-the-edge) in places like Delhi that guarantee their chaos, their poverty. This is too simple, however. There are plenty of cities with higher edge volume than Delhi where such deprivation is harder to find, which makes us begin to wonder what the measurement of urban ‘entropy’ really means beyond being a measure of spatial logic. Not all of those cities with higher edge volume, for instance, share the extremity of Delhi’s air pollution; it’s not unthinkable in time to come that the many-headed concept of urban entropy might be repurposed to refer to the degree to which a city produces waste that is harmful in broad ecological terms, as well as to the immediate health and wellbeing of its citizens. Even here, while Delhi’s air pollution is certain indicative of waste, and waste that can and wll knock years off your life, it doesn’t bring the city anywhere close to having the highest per capita carbon footprint among cities, a handful of whose high-rankers (per-capita) are Boeing’s paragons of low-entropy, while the previous entry on our list claims top spot when it comes to net carbon footprint.
One of the great questions that lurks not merely unanswered, but mostly unasked, in the various literature devoted to the geometries of city planning and the many ways of working an urban fabric is: what orientation of elements in a city is actually most conducive to economic growth? What type of urban planning actually results in citizens becoming more prosperous and secure over time? If we look at Delhi, we can see that the average citizen earns a salary that puts them in the lowest reaches of the. national middle class; interestingly, the average Londoner earns well under what they would need to in order to be counted London middle-class. Owing to the way in which accession to the middle class — we are talking specifically about the lowest band of income that is considered necessary to afford a middle class lifestyle — is intimately bound up with things like a city’s ability to build housing stock (reducing rents and sale prices) and commission productivity-bolstering infrastructure (increasing wages), we might posit that more chaotic city structures (which may or may not tend on average to more aggressive zoning regulation as a result) make sorting out these two issues more difficult. London and Delhi certainly suffer from them both.
In Delhi, we can also see that the determination to modernise combines more prodigiously with gestures to remote history than it does in Seoul — and yet, being so accretive and fragmentary in its developmental history, the lines between old and new in Delhi are considerably less distinct than in Seoul, and inevitably then less theatrically deployed. It has a similar number of edges to a city like Mumbai, and a similar list of general difficulties (rapid growth, ecological poverty, congestion to the point of gridlock) to a city like Jakarta, which is more orthogonal according to Boeing’s schema. Moreover, considering Delhi’s beyond-the-edge factor, not only do zoning issues interfere with the ability to harness the productive potential of land, so do the rampant violations of those same laws; as many as a third of Delhites live in illegal colonies built in violation of zoning laws. I’m sure that buried within this, probably pending further formal investigation, there’s some insight as to how ultra-chaotic topographic and behavioural characteristics of Delhi make it difficult for hyperstimulation to become productive, but that’s altogether too mature an assertion to put forth just yet.
Nonetheless, seems as though we can now begin to sort out a couple of principles about urban stimulant factor. Just as it seems that economic destinies are not exclusively determined by how easy it is to get from point a to point b in a city, as expressed by edge volume (where a-to-b is easier in low-edge cities, and harder in high-edge cities), it may be the case that hyperstimulation is less likely to occur in highly orthogonal cities. Returning to the comparison between Delhi and Jakarta, it seems we can also make the assertion that more orthogonal city planning does not necessarily mitigate against these issues of large organisation that the two cities share. It also illustrates a point that, though it seems obvious enough, is worthy clarifying, on account of how easily it might otherwise be taken for high-value dogma — that what makes a city hyperstimulating is not necessarily what makes it optimally productive and growth-oriented.
Moreover, the presence of any of such issues (i.e. rapid growth, ecological poverty, congestion to the point of gridlock) as cities like Delhi and Jakarta share is not even a predictor of economic performance overall. To take once again the matter of congestion, London is more severely congested than Delhi or Jakarta, and while the respective edge volumes of these cities do appear to roughly predict their susceptibility to congestion, London is also markedly cleaner and richer per capita than either of these cities. Of course, then, Los Angeles comes along and demolishes this incipient hypothesis by being exemplarily orthogonal (low edge-volume) and terribly congested and historically polluted and decidedly non-hyperstimulating. London also goes most of the way towards demolishing another hypothesis — that urban stimulant factor is primarily a function of how scale, population diversity, higher edge volume, and economic vibrancy combine — by having tons of scale, diversity, edge volume, and economic might, and still conspiring out of it all to be non-hyperstimulating.
Thus, the further we venture into both the individual matters of orthogonality and hyperstimulation, and how they combine, the more mysterious the relationship seems to become. What is hyperstimulating is no predictor alone of economic power. Economic power guarantees neither high urban stimulant factor nor a higher (nor, for that matter, a lower) likelihood to be orthogonal in layout. Either the science of city building is far more complex than these parameters can cope with, or it does not exist at all. Time for further probing.
The New Metropoli of China
It is my regret that, having never visited China, I cannot in any real sense include any Chinese cities on this list, though I should imagine their approaches to both urban planning in general, and their urban stimulant factors more specifically, would give us much to ponder, particularly in the context of China’s decided competence in harnessing infrastructural initiatives to priorities in social engineering, and what those priorities are (that is, how they plan their cities to achieve the twin goals of economic growth and conformity to strict social codes).
While I’ve never been to China to have means to speculate on these things, that aforementioned competence in not just getting things built, but understanding why they are being built and how to optimise them for purpose, does inform a lot of the extant literature on the mysterious bond between urban layout and the economic performance of urban property. Alongside perfectly obvious assertions about the nature of cities — like that bigger cities are more economically productive and stimulate more innovation — much of the more interesting research on how the shape of an urban landscape maps onto performance comes from Chinese universities. One comparative study of the cities of Kunming and Guiyang found that Kunming had both a more intense polycentric pace of urban development, and higher GDP growth, than Guiyang, but also noted that “owing to different regions of industry and labor services, the level of development in the inner region of the city does not have horizontal comparability.” This seems to be something ready to generally confound our attempts to find a simple binding law that unites approach-to-planning and economic growth.
Other findings — these from the Chinese University of Geosciences — indicate that urban land use efficiency and economic development have a complex, fluctuating relationship that varies over time and space. It’s all quite equivocal. The only place this lane of scholarship threatens to become allusive is in a collaborative paper (featuring scholars from the States, China, the UK and Turkey) suggesting that diversity of available goods favourably impacts economic development of a city. Diversity of available goods is certainly one of the things that determines a city’s urban stimulant factor, as anyone addicted to retail therapy, street food markets, or contraband can attest.
New York/Manhattan
New York (specifically, the municipality of Manhattan) is just about the only city that accords to Boeing’s grid-based ideal that I have visited and would consider hyperstimulating. Its appearance here will not surprise anyone who has visited it. New York is more symbolic of the power of the modern city than any other city could ever hope to be. It is, in a way that both informs its hyperstimulant aspect and transcends it, sublime.
America was not the first country to embrace orthogonal city design. Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley, one of the world’s oldest major cities, featured a north-south-east-west orthogonal grid, while gridded patterns are the staple element of Ancient Chinese city design. America is not even the first of the Americas to have accorded in large part to orthogonal urban planning. In 1573, King Phillip II of Spain issued the Law of the Indies in 1573, a systematised edict laying out how Spanish colonists ought to select the sites for their settlements, and detailing the rectilinear street networks, based around central plazas, they ought to consist of.
Considering the fact that New York is planned not very much differently from a host of other American cities which do not come anywhere close to being hyperstimulating — proving that scale is not all you need to make a city interesting — then we must attribute New York’s urban-stimulant factor to pure concentration, and to the unique way in which its architecture channels an overwhelming sense of gothic-modern optimism not found anywhere else in the world.
That’s the word — concentration. New York is overcrowded and overstuffed; more languages are spoken there daily than in any other city in the world. Representatives of 200-odd ethnicities can be found in Manhattan and the other four boroughs. This accordingly translates to as much variety as at least four of your five senses can cope with (and, if you’re lucky, the fifth one too).
And then there’s the architectural feel of the city itself. The mandate of the 1916 Zoning Resolution dictated that the scale of new buildings in Manhattan had to be harmonised to lot size with proper setback so that sunlight could reach the city streets. But within those limits, every stimulant opportunity has been taken.
The Gothic revivalism characteristic of some of Manhattan’s most iconic buildings is itself a style that tends to hyperstimulation, protruberant and vaguely confrontational and infinitely detailed. Then, the ghost of a specifically American optimism is given clarion voicing by the Art Deco stylings native to the remainder of Manhattan’s most memorable buildings. The Art Deco sentinels of Gotham are perhaps the most joyous expressions of industrial spirit to be found anywhere, product of a period of unusually warm thinking about the possibilities of industry. In the era whence Anglo-Dutch petty civility gave way to lattices of mills stretching across England’s green and pleasant land, poets bemoaned industry’s dehumanising qualities. That same tendency to dehumanisation is bemoaned, with much less skill, in our era of globalised supply chains. But in the major Manhattan architects’ race to the sky, there stands an immortal story of American self-confidence — of a belief in the power of those uniquely American virtues, scale and determination and earnestness-in-pursuit, to act as civilisation’s motors of advance. They are the first buildings in a long time to gleam with the suggestion that building stuff is ‘a good thing’. These skyscrapers have by now been superseded in size, but their stories remain the largest and loudest in Manhattan, and by far the most stimulating.
And they are stimulating not just because they give such a profound sense of contrapuntalism — of millions of stories unfolding independently and interlacing attritively with one another — but because they are challenging. There is a sense of containment in Manhattan, but not like the feeling one experiences in a walled city like Carcassonne in France. The old walled communes give one a sense of being surrounded at all times in a fortified embrace. Manhattan’s walled aspect, on the other hand, is oppressive. It bears down on you with entrepreneurial example; with all its great erections of steel and commercial ambition, each vying to rise higher than its neighbours for the purity of the desire to do so, it asks “What are you building?” Appropriately for a nation founded on entrepreneurial initiative, and which taught the world of the nobility-apparent in the act of making money, New York stimulates to action. It does so with a sneer and the absence of charity and, you feel, a pride in breaking those who it can break, and it does so by enlivening even the grime of its most squalid reaches with the same tacit assertion: that great achievements too can grow out of such muck. In few other places does even poverty seem so full of promise as in New York.
Bounded on both sides by river, Manhattan has a sure sense of limit that only serves to give the — here it comes again, that word — concentration of its massive structures, and the variety of the lives led among them, greater sensory impact. In fact, it is the smaller surface area of the city limits (Manhattan is by far the smallest of the hyperstimulating municipalities on our list; you could fit 25 of them inside Delhi) that alludes to the vital importance in Manhattan’s case of being low-edge and low-entropy. It’s impossible to imagine a cohesive urban environment being possible in such an instance as you retained all of Manhattan’s vital, quantifiable characteristics but made its street system more irregular. The orthogonal layout sustains the city’s wild life force by containing it. With any more edges, the whole thing would just become unworkable.
It is these attributes, and the sense all the time of a power straining against its own limits, which overwhelm the orthogonality that otherwise tends to make American cities poorer in urban stimulant factor. Manhattan has the largest proportion of four-way intersections and the smallest proportion of dead-end nodes out of all the ones in Boeing’s study. Functions of geography and architecture have made it so that the regularity of Manhattan’s infrastructure are set powerfully against the chaotic interplay of a wider diversity of cultural expression and self-interest than you can reasonably find anywhere else.
Venice
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