Another Sort of Portland Loo

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Some years ago, the City engineered a public bathroom solution called the "Portland Loo" which is a built thing and can be seen across the city in some parks and in the Old Town area of inner NW Portland.

There is, though, another sort of Portland loo, and it's much more portable.

It's much more forthright about the reason it's there, too.

IMSO, this City has stumbled on a number of issues over the last several years. This, however, is not one of them. This is a positive public good and extraordinarily humane, and, sometimes, just the thing you need when you need it.

[map] Tales of the Grid: Zion, An Illinoisan Erstwhile Utopia

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Brenda Balin over on the Book'o'face recommended this town to me, while I was going on about The Grid two articles back. This is a good one. She's written about it before and knoweth whereof she speaketh.

There is a town in northeastern Illinois, not-quite-but-almost snugged into the northeastern corner, on the Lake Michigan shore just south of the Wisconsin state line, called Zion. A name like that suggests a churchgoing pioneer, and that would be correct: the founder of the city, a man named John Dowie, who formed a church there on the city's founding, in 1901.

In Zion, numbered streets run east and west, named avenues (most of which in the town proper and all but one in the original city itself had been drawn from the Bible) ran north and south. A map view of the town plan shows a distinct, yet half-realized pattern:

Image courtesy Google Maps satellite view (of course) 

A circle at the center, with four wide boulevards converging from the cardinal points and three diagonal streets aiming that general direction but never quite getting there. There is a suggestion of a fourth, in pointing northeastward from the central square, but zooming in in Google satellite view suggests that the only thing that ever got built in that right-of-way was a foot- or bicycle-path.

The piety of the original founder is preserved in that there is a church there in the central circle, in Shiloh (another biblical name) Park.

Zion was completely planned out before it was built; a 'planned city' from the get-go, and the plan's inspirations were twofold. One was the Biblical inspiration for the names. The other was from the planner's heart – he was a import from the Commonwealth, specifically Scotland, and his graphic inspiration was, specifically, this:

… the Union Flag of Great Britain. When viewed on the modern-day planning department's zoning map, the image of the flag is perhaps a bit clearer:

Zion in at the beginning must have been quite a place. The founder not only envisioned a perfectly-planned physical town (eventually hoped to contain as many as 200,000 people) but also envisioned it as a religious utopia here on Earth:

Dowie owned everything personally, although settlers were offered 1,100-year leases (i.e., 100 years to usher in the Kingdom and 1,000 for Christ's millennial reign — after that, seemingly, you were on your own). The leases specifically forbade gambling, dancing, swearing, spitting, theaters, circuses, the manufacture and sale of alcohol or tobacco, pork, oysters, doctors, politicians — and tan-colored shoes. The city police carried a billy club on one hip and a Bible on the other; their helmets were adorned with a dove and the word "PATIENCE." At the height of his power and influence, Dowie was worth several million dollars and claimed 50,000 followers, 6,000 of whom lived in Zion City.

I couldn't make it there myself. I mean, I can do without circuses and oysters, but pork and tan shoes? I draw the line at pork and tan shoes, man. If there were a just God, he'd not want me to do without my tan shoes.

A top of the hat to the Wikipedia page who provided the basic historical skeleton, and for a more thorough exploration of the man John Alexander Dowie (a man, whom I'm sure if God were asked would opine Now, that one is a piece of work, and how) read this unexpectedly-compelling page at a site about music in the works of James Joyce: http://www.james-joyce-music.com/extras/dowie_bio.html. He started out a piece of work and built himself into a towering and rather absurd edifice, but isn't that a classic American story?

[urban_design] Islamabad: The Grid As Pakistani Capital

1222. As part of this blog's urban design commentary series, we decided to go topical with a look at the layout of Pakistan's capital city, Islamabad.

The city is located in the country's far north, near (or very near, depending on whose interpretation of Pakistani territorial limits you respect) the country's border with India. It is immediately adjacent to another major Pakistani city, Rawalpindi – notable as the home base of the Pakistanti General Military Staff. For a great deal of Pakistan's modern history, the city of Karachi – located next to the Indus River delta, and still by far Pakistan's largest city, served as the country's capital. Sometime during the 1960's, though, it was felt that Karachi no longer was the ideal place for Pakistan's leadership. Not only was it old and crowded, it was vulnerable to attack from the sea, and probably held a disproportionate share of national capital development.

As other countries who established new-era capital cities during that time, most notably Brazil's Brasilia and Australia's Canberra, the developing authorities chose to order and plan the city for present order and to channel future growth into desirable (or at least controllable) patterns. The city of Islamabad was thus organized on a rectilinear grid (map below nicked from this site):


Clicky to embiggen. A remarkable feature of the plan can be seen in the notations that emblazon each block: each is identified by a letter-number combination, the letters going from A at the northernmost extremity of the planned urban area and 1 at the farthest east tip, and increasing south and west). Each block is locally known as a sector.

Here, nicked from Islamabad's Capital Development Authority map (click here to go to the main city guide; click on the area labeled "Zone I" to gain access to the residential-commercial sections), is a map of Sector G-10:


Here yet another level of structure reveals itself: each sector is divided into four quarter-sectors, labeled G-10/1, G-10/2, G-10/3, and G-10/4. While the rationale for each sector is the same they are not identical; the quarter-sectors in one sector will not be the same size and shape as those in the next sector. Also notable is the provision of a commercial area in each sector (here noted as Markaz G-10). Reviewing the maps shows that every developed sector has one, typically in the middle (though some have them along one edge). We suspect the interior numbered streets are probably numbered in order of planning or construction. We daresay that the structure of curved and straight streets distributed within each sector reminds one of the layout of some suburban areas of American cities.

The level of planning and order has one more layer; the capital territory area withal is divided into five Zones. Zone I contains commercial, business, residential and national government; Zone II appears to be devoted to heavy industry; Zones III, IV, and V appear to be devoted to either natural open space, more planned housing development, or a mixture (Zone III seems to be strictly natural open space).

It must also be said that a totally-designed city plan is nothing new for national capitals. Even our own capital city, Washington DC, was built on a strict plan that was as much about designing a city as a single unit as it is about keeping things in thier proper places.

Tags: urban design, city planning