The growth of a city in many respects resembles the growth of a tree. Two intersecting streets laid out in the beginning sprout ever more numerous cross-streets, which in time send out their own and so on without end. Successive intersections arise; soft surfaces are paved over; a network of water pipes expands, hidden beneath the ground. A tree grows through the vitality of the seed and the juices drawn from the earth but the shape and density of the crown depend on the person who trims the branches with pruning shears. A city too grows through power and faith. But its layout quite evidently depends on the way the foundations are set down. Thus in analyzing the arrangement of the streets it is possible to discern the will and the beliefs that have left their stamp on it.
The arrangement of the streets in turn was devised in such a way as to thwart chance occurrences and to avert convoluted thoughts. Since life is from a certain perspective only a replication of urban design, order in the city compels order in the mind. The creators of the plan, whoever they were, achieved their purpose though they did not trust in architecture and scorned the tricks of city planning. No detail was overlooked in their decisions; they presented their demands in raised voices and took complications in their stride, hammering their fists upon the table. They did not have to adapt their intentions to fit the rules of an art foreign to them. The defiant simplicity of their treatments indicates that in fact they were proud of this. They knew nothing of logarithms but they understood that complexity is a cause of error. They sought a principle of construction that would determine the form of the city conclusively and comprehensively and would always protect it from the destructive influence of ambiguity.
Here it must be explained categorically that the guiding principle of a city can be the right angle, the meander or the star. It is this that shapes the course of events which will play out in the city from the very beginning of its existence: the meetings, the collisions, the coincidences. To say nothing of the circulation of the clouds. From the blueprint emerge the exigencies of life, from the examples in textbooks come the laws of physics, never the other way around.
For example a city of right angles is such that the location of one thing in relation to another signifies no more than distance and direction. Space cannot absorb or convey any substance beyond the purely practical, superficial, and indifferent. Every corner is equally important. Monuments are merely figures of stone besoiled by pigeons. The value of land, regulated by supply and demand, can easily be expressed in currency. The vacillations of stock prices are subject to no one’s will. There exists no force capable of tipping the equally laden scales. Nothing that would ensure the appearance of only heads or only tails on coins spun in the air. Nothing that would make every card drawn from the pack turn out to be the ace of hearts or alternately the two of spades. Through a point that does not lie on a straight line it is only ever possible to draw one straight line parallel to the first. For this reason even justice here is as pedantic as geometry, devoid of inspiration or panache, predictable.
The principle of the meander turns streets into a chaotic labyrinth, creating countless numbers of figures of various shapes on top of each other and permeating one another, any of which may turn out to be part of a larger whole. A city that conforms to the principle of the meander will prove to be filled with tempting or terrifying possibilities, appetizing or nauseating leftovers, enticing or repulsive smells, and mingled sounds: shop sign against shop sign, rickshaw on rickshaw, without a single centimeter of free space. From every square a variety of streets leads to the next square, making the inhabitants’ heads spin and their eyes flit about in every direction, their minds cluttered with the perpetual weighing of alternatives. Everything turns out to be relative, while the observation of relations of consequence, the attribution of effects to causes, the laying down of parallel lines, and the dispensation of justice are not possible at all.
Only the inhabitants of a city built according to the design of the star are never faced with the necessity of choice. They are obliged to move around in straight lines, yet in a certain sense all straight lines there are parallel. In every place only one appropriate road meets the eye. And so the calm pedestrians look directly ahead, which gives them an expression of infinite patience. The main streets there lead radially to the most important point, which marks the true center. In it is situated the heart of the city. From here the whole city is clearly visible; in the twinkling of an eye one can see right through it along with all its interiors, even its telephone wells, its storm drains and its rows of cellars. It contains within itself a lasting record of the order of the world to which it belongs and an invaluable ready outline of the values that will be assigned to the things it contains. The gravitational force of the objects placed in the scales will depend not only on their mass but above all on their estimated worth. Thanks to the shrewdness of these estimations it will transpire that things that have not occurred will often be more deserving of praise or scorn than those that have actually taken place.
On clean drafting paper it is easiest to draw rectangles. Thanks to the mechanical properties of draftsmen’s instruments, they multiply on its surface of their own accord, leaving no room for other shapes. Stars, on the other hand, originate in the mind. There, far from earth, this breeding ground of ants and worms, they glitter all at once, and their irrepressible rays slice through the darkness. But no one knows where the meander comes from; it is foreign to sober reason that aids the movements of set squares, and foreign, too, to luminous imaginings. Its twisting form is evidence of the resistance presented to the essence of the meander by the set square and rule and also by the thought guiding the pencil. The star’s ray bends in the field of attraction of every rectangle and having broken free seeks its straight path anew — and then again and once more, always without success. The intricacy of the drawing demonstrates that the design of the star, woven from dreams, is incongruent with the worldly design of right angles arising from lines drafted on paper. But between the forces of the rectangle and the star a state of equilibrium may emerge and be sustained amid the meanders of ideology and dry calculation.
And what about the intention of putting down lines? Why did the draftsmen begin to draw them instead of waiting for them to appear by themselves on the surface of the paper or even in space? In ordering the lines to be drawn the builders revealed their belief in one of the possible truths that could be thought, on a basis that would always remain a matter of faith since it was by nature unverifiable. Though it remains a supposition it is not hard to interpret. It proclaims that it is not the power of germinating seeds and not the pressure of juices circulating between the roots and the crown that give the world life, but that it is set in motion by motors, gears, and cogs, devices that keep the sun and stars rotating, pull the clouds across the horizon and drive water along the bed of the river. The clarity and simplicity of this notion may prove salutary. They will make it possible to dismantle, repair and reinstall every broken component — so long as the world is composed only of separate and removable parts and any process can be corrected independently of all the others without worrying that the whole will become imbalanced. Put another way, cities based on stars and cities based on right angles are superior to cities based on meanders, so long as the world is a machine.