Redesigning Gridded Cities focuses with extreme detail on four
paradigmatic gridded cities, Manhattan, Chicago, Barcelona, and Hangzhou
by analyzing these cities and proposing their own interventions that
implicate the grid in productive ways. They emphasize the value of open
forms for city design, and specifically insist that the grid has the
unique capacity to absorb and channel urban transformation flexibly and
productively. In both historical and projective, this series of books
explore the potential of the grid as a design tool to produce a
multitude of urban processes and forms.
The construction of modern Barcelona can be seen as a laboratory of
urban projects and planning strategies. This process spanning more than
150 years features a series of innovative experiments that correspond to
different scales and explain the complexity involved in constructing
such a singular capital city.