Chicago: Two Grids Between Lake and River

by Joan Busquets i Grau, Christina Crawford

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.

This publication about the city of Chicago is the product of a research project at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design to reinterpret the theme of the regular― gridded―city and to test its potential to assist in designing the contemporary city. There were two main aims for this research. The first pedagogical aim was to identify the morphological attributes of the gridded city and to understand the current value of this tool that has been built in the most varied cultures. The second, speculative, aim was to explore broadly urban design principles that can address issue particular to the 21st century city.

132 pages, Paperback

Published June 1, 2017

About the author

Joan Busquets i Grau (El Prat de Llobregat, 1946) és un arquitecte i urbanista català titulat per la Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya el 1969 i doctorat per la mateixa el 1975, en la qual ocupa actualment la càtedra d'urbanisme. També és catedràtic de la Graduate School of Design de la Universitat Harvard des de 2002, i professor convidat i consultor en universitats de diversos països. Va ser guardonat amb el Premi Erasmus l'any 2011, un premi anual per a una persona que hagi fet una contribució excepcional a la cultura europea, societat o ciències socials, "en reconeixement a la seva impressionant i multifacètica tasca en el camp de la planificació urbanística ". També li fou atorgat el Premi Nacional de Cultura l'any 2011 per la seva aportació com a urbanista, escriptor i professor.