#21: Ladders & the Closed Internet
I just finished Albert Pope's Ladders for the second time, one of the best (and most underrated) books on architecture and urbanism I've ever read. Ladders is required reading for anyone who senses that the changes cities have undergone in the past fifty years are still poorly understood by the urban theorists tasked with explaining them to us. Pope's argument, in short, is that traditional urban fabric, characterized by the grid, is a type of built environment we stopped producing decades ago, and everything we actually do build, from malls to office parks to freeways, constitute an alternative form of urbanism that remains outside of any framework we have for understanding and dealing with cities. We essentially ignore it.
I've oversimplified Ladders for brevity's sake (but really, go read it). Pope spends a lot of time praising the grid and its role in prewar urban development, observing that even suburbs in that era were built on grids, with the assumption that cities would spread outward indefinitely and connect to one another. What actually happened was that a new type of development, initiated by the freeway, "closed off" the grid and thus curtailed the ability the believe in an open, infinitely extending city, which grids represented.
I often compare cities to the internet, particularly the bad transformations that have afflicted both, and the closure of cities that Pope describes in Ladders closely parallels what has happened to the internet since the book was published in 1996. The open internet of the '90s was the grid city, while today's internet is made up of closed enclaves like Facebook or Twitter and the residual dead zones in between (something I called "failure space"). By pointing this condition out, Pope creates the possibility of reclaiming the space that we currently don't even see and might eventually open back up.
Reads:
Using machine learning to generate British place names.
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Until next time,
Drew