The urban landscape: reading the city map

Looking from above or from a vantage point at great height one can get a true sense of the urban landscape. It is exactly for that reason that such attractions draw in crowds of locals and tourists alike. And I also appreciate that perspective, having climbed up church towers, having taken cable cars and having stood in line for television towers with panorama restaurants and Ferris wheels.

Reading the city map on paper -or nowadays online- can give great insight. For the trained eye the printed plan can reveal the reality on site, or at least give a clue to what can be expected. The arrangements of streets and blocks, the size of the blocks, the distance between the blocks and even the shape of these blocks can indicate a type of use, a certain building height or even a style of architecture. Even to the untrained eye the city map shows the clearly different patterns associated with planned versus organic urban development.

The origins of a city, town or urbanised landscape can shine through in the patterns visible on the city map. Steep hills result in different patterns than flat land. Building in the mountains requires a different technical skills compared to building on flat clay soils on a floodplain. Of course building on a floodplain requires separate measures to keep dry feet and guard against flooding, for instance by raising dikes and empoldering the land. The original landscape shines through in the different types of water city. Political and historic events can also have an effect on how the urban pattern has come into being. This is visible in the baroque grid city of Ludwigsburg, in the regular grid of the Leopoldsburg town and military camp (Kamp Beverlo), or in twin cities (Brandenburg a/d Havel, Lierre, Nuremberg, Vught). Industrial cities, or the urbanised landscape that resulted from industrialisation shows on a maps or orthophotos as a different spatial pattern. Features such as spoil heaps -in mining regions, docks and harbours, railway sidings and industrial complexes with large structures are all indicative of industrial cities. Even when industrial activity has ceased the urban landscape will show tell-tale signs of the former use in the relics of the past or the spatial patterns.

The post-industrial urban landscape between Wattenscheid, Gelsenkirchen and Rotthausen in the Ruhr Area shows little evidence of the heavy industry that once dominated the landscape here. Only three spoil heap (brown outline) remain; all collieries (in purple) have been dismantled. Some of these sites are now used as industrial sites, other have been developed for housing or for sports and recreation. Most of the old freight railways (shown in red) have been taken up and have been transformed into cycling routes.

Since the industrial revolution mankind has been more able to shape the land and land use by technical means. That doesn’t mean that the situation, natural elevation or hydrology are of no influence. Only a dedicated dictator would insist on a sea harbour in the middle of an inland dessert. Hydrology poses both spatial and functional limitations. Moats and canals need to be dug to be able to make an area suitable for urbanisation. The houses will need a specific type of construction (on long timbers to prevent subsidence). The water levels need to be controlled by sluices, dykes and weirs. Polders are not created for the fun of it, but are always the result of the hydrological situation combined with the desired use of the land. Hydrological unit -such as polders- tend to survive urban expansion as their functionality within the system is such that as entities they need to remain. This is for instance visible in the northern Y-polders in Amsterdam.

Old routes can often still be identified. In fact some main roads go back centuries to roads built by the Romans or follow even older routes. Such routes are always continuous. Where they appear differently on the map there must be as specific reason behind this. The reason for a discontinuous route can be a natural obstacle (steep incline, ravine, river), a barred zone (church freedom, abbey, military barracks, prison, royal wood), a shift in ownership of the land, a break in land clearance, human intervention (canal, city fortifications, railway line, spoil heap, quarry), a functional diversion (realignment of the road to a new bridge) or a traffic planning decision. Between routes patterns are rarely continuous. The exception can be seen in places where the agricultural parcellation has been adapted as the basis for the urban pattern (De Jordaan in Amsterdam is a famous example).

Amsterdam has some clear pattern differences that are both indicative of (past) use and the pre-existing situation. In yellow the rounded first city around a dam in the river Amstel (A) separating into several canals (moats) to better allow urban development. The famous Canal Belt (c) wraps around the old city. Within the old girdle canal (Singelgracht) and city wall (W) several docks (blue outline) were dug for shipbuilding and warehousing. Adjacent to these 17^th-century docks new harbours and docks (H) were created in the 19^th century after the Y was empoldered. The pattern of the Jordaan neighbourhood -west of the Canal Belt- continues beyond the wall into later developments (green).  

Old routes often form the boundary between distinct patterns. All edges were two patterns meet are especially interesting. These occur in many places and are always manmade. In urban patterns that developed organically the difference is often based in history. A certain area would have been developed at a different time in history, by a different owner or be based on a different underlying pattern or landscape feature (for instance the difference between the city on high and low ground in Nuremberg). Aggregation of specific use can also lead to a difference in pattern; just think of the many market places and the artisanal quarters in medieval cities, the docks and warehouses in Manchester, London or Antwerp, sports complexes, or the large retail complexes with leisure facilities and offices.

Urbanisation can also mean the obliteration of the original pattern. This phenomenon is often associated with International Modernism, bus this is not the first time in history a new spatial and functional order would be imposed on the terrain. This tabula rasa approach can also be seen in ancient colonies, in Roman forts, in medieval fortified cities, in baroque cities, in the colonies in the Americas, in 17^th and 18^th century classicist new towns and suburbs, in 19^th century industrial complexes and collieries, in 19^th century axial interventions, in 20^th century ring roads and motorways and so on. These new imposed patterns often have very clear edges or produce conflicting patterns that sit side-by-side within the urban landscape. This actually gives an urban landscape more identity than one that is simply made up of urban sprawl -like for instance some sections of Outer London which is best characterised as a sea of similar houses along similar streets with some scattered insular features.

Like any other landscape, an urban landscape is defined by its component parts and the edges or gradual transitions that exist between these. An urban landscape is thus composed of sections that either have a clear functional, spatial or visual difference, or have a varying degree of urbanity. The degree of urbanity is the measure and density of urban features; a park has a low degree of urbanity, whilst a business district with office towers, shops and restaurants has a high degree of urbanity.