Chess holds the secret to saving our cities
Saturday, Dec 7, 2013 05:00 PM CST
What this game of strategy can show us about building the metropolis of the future
Henry Grabar
Pedro Ortiz is on a metropolitan planning mission. Like many urban theorists, he uses metaphors to illustrate his points, and his preferred comparison is to games.
Too often, Ortiz says, we think of the metropolis like a dartboard, one whose concentric circles of development decline in value and importance with distance from the center. This is the radial or orbital model of metropolitan planning, one that prizes centrality above all. It is, for Ortiz, a design whose failures have rendered it obsolete.
Instead, he suggests we imagine the metropolis as a chessboard, where every square plays a role and control of the center can be complemented by clever play along the edges. Ortiz calls this system of evenly spaced nodes and gridded traffic corridors the “reticular,” and it is his trademark method of planning. In a metropolitan scheme for Bogotá, Colombia, Ortiz actually placed chess pieces on a map, each corresponding to a particular sub-regional function: an airport, town center or commercial business district.
“Metropolises are not at all like cities,” Ortiz told me over the phone last week. Developing the regional plan for Madrid in the mid-’90s, Ortiz learned that metropolitan planning, in addition to foresight, requires coordination and sacrifice. “Every mayor wanted to be a queen. But their role was not to be a queen or a king but to be a knight, a bishop or a pawn.”
To make regions function as a whole, Ortiz designed the Metro-Matrix, a system marked by linearity – intersecting transportation lines organized around natural features – and numerous centers. It’s an idea that Ortiz, a senior urban planner at the World Bank, has since exported to cities as distinct as Cairo, Mexico City, Istanbul and Manila, and whose principles he expounds in a new manual, “The Art of Shaping the Metropolis.” Given the pace of global urbanization, time is short. Looking onto unplanned slums spreading like oil stains around Accra, Ghana, and Monrovia, Liberia, or doubling year over year at the margins of N’Djamena, Chad, and Amman, Jordan, Ortiz sees a time bomb.
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At the urban scale, the grid is the oldest and most popular design we have. It brings obvious advantages to movement, organization, architecture and real estate in the city. But rarely has it been successfully deployed as a regional strategy.
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A city full of chess.
Just as squares on a chessboard become more or less valuable in accordance with the arrangement of pieces on the board, developments within the metropolis are more or less suited to certain locations, depending on the location of other developments. In the pursuit of the analogy for easier comprehension of the need for game-like strategy and the tactics of the pieces, we proposed the following urban structural definition:
The king is the primary urban center of the metropolis—the capital city. The whole system depends on it and it has to work for the best, most fundamentally for the residents of the metropolis, but also in international terms, since its economy depends on international positioning in a global context.
The queen is the most important strategic figure. The economy is organized around it, and its movements reach and control the whole chess board. The ports or international airports—export links for a globalized world economy—are the most important features for a global metropolis. Its international role depends on them.
The bishops criss-cross their interest in an interwoven strategy. They are the specialized productive centers. They are clustered in their sectoral specialization, but interwoven in a general economic strategy.
The knights are more territorial centers. They control a more immediate territory. They are commercial sub-centers of local activities and services. Their joint network forms the basic second-tier territorial fabric.
The pawns are basic urban units, primarily residential. They house the territorial control through infantry positioning. They are related to the strategic figures playing a complementary local role. They are the peripheral residential growth centers of the metropolis that access the metropolitan centers through the commuting system.
The rooks play a local role complementary to the queen and the bishops. They are relevant urban centers both in economic production and territorial importance. They are mostly previous urban centers involved in the expanding growth of the metropolis.