Checkerboard Grid: Go and Chinese Chess—Urban Planning and Political Ideologies in American Westward Movement and Ancient China

doi:10.4236/ojpp.2013.34072

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Open Journal of Philosophy

2013. Vol.3, No.4, 502-506

Published Online November 2013 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/ojpp) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojpp.2013.34072

Open Access

502

Checkerboard Grid: Go and Chinese Chess—Urban Planning and

Political Ideologies in American Westward Movement and

Ancient China

Shao qian Zhang

Department of Art, Graphic Design and Art History, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, USA

Email: shaoqian.zha [email protected]

Received September 7th, 2013; revi sed Octob er 7th, 2013; accepted October 15th, 2013

tribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the

original work is properly cited.

Among all forms of city planning, the grid plan appears, historically, to be the most measurable and rec-

ognizable system of civic geography. This paper will explore how and why different social groups have

been able to define the symbolism of the grid to suit their own political purposes and how governments

and patrons have utilized the grid as the spatial manifestation for their political ideologies. This paper will

be based on case studies of cities operating under very dissimilar political systems, i.e., the cities of an-

cient China and the city of Chicago in the Unites States. I argue that the American grid plan focuses on its

peripheries, and that the expansive instinct of the American grid was effective in building a coherent

American nation, transcending regional and class divisions. By contrast, the Chinese grid plan emphasizes

the center, and the practices of urban planning in ancient China symbolized the evaluative tactics of the

elite.

Keywords: Grid Plan; Government Politics; Traditional Chinese Philosophy; Capital City; Chicago

Introduction

City planning is the deployment of the political machine and

its symbolic localization. A planned city can be both receptacle

and representation of social relationships. Ordering the land-

scape by subdividing its geography into rational parts aims

toward efficiency of administration, communication and politi-

cal persuasion. Among all forms of city planning, the grid plan

seems to be the most recognizable and measurable. Everyone

can recognize the checkerboard grid, which is “like a great

geometrical carpet, like a Mondrian painting” (Stilgoe, 2004: p.

5). A grid subdivides a continent into repeated graph squares on

paper and it appears to be simply a triumph of the mathematic

and scientific art.

However, it is safe to suggest that nobody has fully under-

stood the grid as city planning, even though this way of plan-

ning mathematically is nothing new and partic ular. The fa scin a-

tion with geometry and the grid has been applied around the

world, in ancient China and throughout the Roman Empire. The

implication of the grid plan is manifold. “The grid’s mythic

power,” as Krauss wrote, “is that it makes us able to think we

are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic)

while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief

(or illusion, or fiction)” (Krauss, 1985: p. 12). The grid has the

function of making one see for oneself rather than being some-

thing ideal and materialistic in and of itself. Its simple and

seemingly universal form gives rise to different political ide-

ologies and powe r s .

In an attempt to engage these issues, this paper will explore

how and why different social groups are able to define the

symbol of grid to suit their own political purposes; how gov-

ernments and patrons utilize the grid as the spatial manifesta-

tion for their political ideologies. This paper will be based on

case studies of cities of different political systems, ancient

Chinese cities and Chicago in the Unites States. Attention will

be given to applications of grid plans, whic h defin e the spac e of

cities, and even ess ence o f nations diff erently.

America

The grid, with its mathematical equality and indifference to

variations, makes it very easy to lay out new towns before set-

tlement. The grid was first applied to America by colonists and

then by Americans themselves, in an effort to control the vast

landscape. In 1784, Jefferson was appointed by the Continental

Congress to be in charge of a committee to devise a plan for the

temporary government of the Western territory. Jefferson de-

vised the rectangular survey as a way of simplifying real estate

transactions. Soon it was enacted into law and divided the land

west of the original thirteen colonies into an orthogonal grid of

36-square-mile townships; each in turn was divided into one-

mile square sections.

As observed by American architecture historian, John W.

Reps, the indiscriminate application of the square grid of the

1785 Land Survey to the entire Western territory of the United

States was a logical expression of practicality, establishing

control over the land with the greatest degree of speed, effi-

ciency, and potential interest (Reps, 1965). The grid proved

reasonably effective in ordering the land for sale and settlement.

It made it easy to describe rectangular parcels of land on maps,

S. Q. ZHANG

so that speculators could buy and sell them sight unseen. In

addition to its mathematical regularity, it was “flexible, with

plenty of room for variety within and between the presumably

anonymous blocks” (Reps, 1965: p. 267). Space was counted in

order to be occupied. The grid was a versatile planning model

and open to expansion once planned. It used a hydraulic model,

as opposed to the stable, the eternal and the constant.

Almost all cities, towns, and villages planned after the turn of

the 18th century reflected an underlying grid in their physical

appearance. Chicago unexceptionally accepted the expression

of Jefferson’s grid. Chicago had two dominant natural features:

the expanse of Lake Michigan, which stretches, unbroken by

islands to the horizon; and a corresponding area of land ex-

tending north, west, and south without hills or any marked ele-

vation. Its lack of geographic features made it highly suitable

for a grid plan. The effects of the city were obtained by repeti-

tion of the unit. Even though the shape of the city was a little

irregular; the perpendicular pattern remained and became cru-

cial for the city’s expansion. A map from 1830 by James

Thompson contributed much to the ultimate shape and person-

ality of the future metropolis. Additions to the city over the last

century extended the grid pattern established in the original

plan. A map of 1834 exhibited Chicago’s first real estate de-

velopment. The Kinzie Addition began from the north of the

Chicago river and east of State Street; the Wolcott Addition

was along the North Branch of the Chicago river. As the West

began to grow prodigiously, overland routes multiplied and

stimulated the growth of the city. The stimulus to Chicago’s

growth also came from the eastern transportation facilities to

the city (Mayer & Wade, 1965: pp. 24-25). The city’s frame-

work, the grid of Chicago, was compatible with the commercial

activities, manufacture and transportation.

The Loop was not only the physical symbol of Chicago’s

commercial power, but also the engine of the city’s expansion.

Concentrated with the Loop were many commercial skyscrap-

ers, government buildings and offices, new department stores

and the leading civic cultural institutions. The old boundaries of

the Loop could no longer contain the growing population and

burgeoning commerce. Commercial facilities expanded from

the center of the city, forcing residential construction to move

to the edge of the town and into the suburbs beyond. Real estate

investors were busy due to the urban development and they

settled into new suburban areas. The grid plan was applied

during this urban expansion. It was relatively easy to designate

city streets by numbers rather than names, permitting fast

growth of the city.

The fire of 1871 did not stop the growth of the city. By 1880

a new cycle of development was under way. Chicago solidified

its position as industrial and commercial leader for the nation

and adopted radical innovation in mass transit, which acceler-

ated its horizontal expansion. The increased speed and effi-

ciency of transportation permitted the vast expansion of the city

beyond its earlier confines. Uncultivated land quickly fell to the

developer and the framework of the grid. Chicago became an

“exploding metropolis” as its grid swallowed up neighborhood

areas (Mayer & Wade, 1965: p. 144).

The great growth of the metropolis took place in the outer

zones rather than central zones. Foreshadowed by Potter

Palmer’s move to Lake Shore Drive in the 1880s, the exodus

from the center became a rush after 1893. Social elites were

eager to escape from the congested city and shifted to the shore

of Lake Michigan on the near north side. Thus, every year,

many people were released from the centrally-located neighbor-

hoods into the middle class areas. There areas occupied a wide

belt around the densely inhabited residential and commercial

core, thinning out toward the municipal limits and fading into

nonurbanized areas. The outward expansion of the metropolis

was not confined to residential development. The central city

was too small and congested to accommodate the growth of

manufacturing. Investors looked for undeveloped land close

enough to the city yet far enough from downtown to be unclut-

tered and cheap (Mayer & Wade, 1965: p. 186).

There seemed to be nothing to prevent Chicago from its rapid

expansion and it was dubbed “the City of Speed” by Newton

Dent of Munsey’s Magazine. He wrote (Mayer & Wade, 1965:

p. 272) :

Nothing, that either man or nature can do, apparently, can

check the growth this city that has spread back from the

lake like a prairie fire, until its great bulk covers nearly

two hundred square miles of Illinois (Mayer & Wade,

1965: p. 272).

Chicago’s grid became a “rhythm without measure” (De-

leuze & Guattari, 1987: p. 264), ready to occupy a non-varying

space. Its keynote was expansion and its vitality lay in its inde-

finable periphery. As addressed by Daniel Burnha m, “Peo ple i n

Chicago must recognize that their city is without bounds or

limits” (Burnham & Bennett, 1993: p. 80). Due to the charac-

teristics of the grid, Chicago was territorialized and at the same

time continually deterritorialized through the opening of fron-

tiers and exodus. The grid was formed not only on the basis of

its powers of accumulation and the city’s extension, but also on

the basis of its capacity to develop itself more deeply, to be

reborn, and to extend itself throughout the latticework of soci-

ety.

To go back to the starting point of Jefferson’s grid, the grid

on American frontier was not, however, strictly functional.

Despite its seemingly practical mechanism, Jefferson’s grid, as

suggested by André Corboz, it reflected a certain ideology and

religious outlook. André Corboz demonstrates in his article

“Die kulturellen Grundlagen des territorialen Rasters in den

USA” that among other things the American grid, which origin-

nated in 1785 with Jefferson’s Ordinance, must be a religious

grid because it follows the same impetus as described in the last

chapter of the Book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament—God

plans Israel as the land of the future, the Promised Land—by

dividing it up into perfectly equal parts among Israel’s twelve

tribes (Corboz, 2001: pp. 186-260)1. He does not intend to ar-

gue that Jefferson gridded America because he wanted to recre-

ate what he had read in the Bible. The argument is about a cer-

tain mentality embedded in the nature of American grid which

is related to the perception of the future. Jefferson saw a corre-

lation between architecture, behavior, and belief. Architecture

was understood by him as “a symbolic expression of a culture’s

ideals and achievements and as an instrument for intellectual

and moral improvement.” For Jefferson, architecture should be

a style appropriate for a democratic society and landscape

should be cultivated properly.

In Jefferson’s ideal version of America, independent farmer

citizens who lived in simple cottages on their plots of land

should occupy the vast landscape for the emerging nation of

America (Kostof, 1987: p. 15). Living the life of a country

1I must thank Julia Ng for translating the German text for me.

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S. Q. ZHANG

squire, he resented centralized urban control and dreamed of an

agrarian America of small towns and farms where every man

was his own master and the vast landscape belonged to all the

people equally. His grid was intended to produce a context of

equilibria and reduce complexities, enabling egalitarian citi-

zenship. Frank Lloyd Wright restated this national faith in the

1930s in his Broadacre City, where citizens would be assigned

to one acre of land so that they could exercise what he called

man’s “social right to his place on the ground” (Kostof, 1987: p.

16). Under the passionate belief of what architecture signified,

Jefferson’s grid subjected four-fifths of the United States to a

regular system of land survey that speedily answered the needs

of an agricultural economy and the conquest of the territories of

the West and was greatly concerned with the theme of the fron-

tier. Ownership of landscape encouraged more than a sense of

independence. Divided up into squares, the land provoked a

sensual hunger in later settlers and its own characteristics pro-

moted its future expansion.

The principle of the grid was that it could be expanded with-

out limit. It set norms because it proceeded from the land as an

abstraction. Not until farmers settled the great rectangles platted

by the surveyor did the lines become more than legal abstrac-

tions of boundaries. Grid run undisturbed over topography and

climate change and gave concrete form to the principle of

equality. The American grid finally expanded and reached the

Pacific in 1910. Its victory lay in its ability to internalize the

outside and swallow up differences. It projected an even surface

without variation. The territory was understood by the grid to

be pure and homogeneous extension without centers. It empha-

sized transportation and communication, as the exterior and

interior were in competition and coexistence.

Each unit was always in relationship with an outside and was

inconceivable outside that relationship. Its energy was in its

frontier, where the interior met the exterior and was ready to

capture the unknown territory. In American grid, it was a ques-

tion arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of

maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point and of

consolidating the unknown territory by the construction of an

adjacent territory. The grid presented itself as a diffuse spatial

machine and produced movement toward expansion and sub-

mission.

Ancient Chinese Grid

The grid plan in China was continuous from the 15th BC

onwards. Guidelines were put into written form in the chapters

of Jiangren yingguo (Craftsmen Constructing the State) Zhouli

Kaogong ji (Records of Craftsmen of Zhou Rituals) during the

Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 BCE). This short para-

graph imposed great influence on historic Chinese city planning

theory:

When a jiangren constructs a state capital, he creates a

square, nine li2 on each side and each side has three gates.

In the capital city are nine north-south avenues and nine

east-west streets. The avenues are nine carriage tracks

wide. On the left is the ancestral temple and to the right is

the altar of soil and grain. In the front is the court palace

and behind the market (Steinhardt, 1990: p. 33).

Jiangren, literally a craftsman, could be properly translated

as “an architect” in this context. Since the Han Dynasty (BCE

206), the social ideas had already taken root in the concept of

architecture. City planners incorporated the political and hier-

archical principles into the city planning. The ideal metropolis

should be well organized and standardized according to the

concept of universal principles. They believed that if they sub-

divided the city into grids, according to universal principles, the

city would be gifted with the symbolic power of the universe.

The squareness, the numerical series based on number three,

the grid in relation to the four cardinal points, the implied

domination of the north-south over the east-west orientation are

the basic elements of an abstract pattern of intentional configu-

ration of a capital city.

The universal principles were incorporated into many ancient

Chinese cities’ architectural layouts, even though not very

strictly. For example, Chang’an was the capital of the Tang

Dynasty (618-907) when China exhibited great strength, sup-

ported by a prosperous economy and strong military. The city

was built rigidly symmetrical with the empire’s palace right in

the center of the northern section of the city. Chang’an was

designed to meet the ruler’s ideal and requirements for the gov-

erning. It was divided into wards made orderly with avenues

running between them. Each ward was guarded by tall and

heavy ward walls, which all together constituted the grid of the

city.

The square shape, the repeated wards and the important pal-

ace position were all traditions from the ritual thoughts, which

materialized the political authority of the emperor. First, as

Records of Craftsmen of Zhou Rituals stipulated, palaces or a

palace city should always be the theme of capital cities, stand-

ing out of the repeated units. Second, the capital city should be

heavily guarded by layers of walls. All units were fenced by

ward walls and the whole city was enclosed in the city walls.

Walls in Chang’an not only guarded the city but also consti-

tuted the framework of the symbolic grid. Thus the grid in

Chang’an was not expansive but restrained and self-defensive.

In the case of Beijing, the grid was not only the symbol, but

also the instrument of the emperor’s political power. The spatial

strategies of the whole Beijing City was epitomized in the ar-

chitectural layout of the Forbidden City, which was a large,

horizontally expansive, architectural complex in a rectangular

shape on a north-south axis, covering an area of about 723,600

square meters. It was the most sacred place in China for over

five hundred years. The Forbidden City was constructed as the

core structure of Beijing and the geo-political center of the

empire. When it was planned, it was expected to be the focus of

the symbolic presence of Chinese imperial power. Before the

Opium War in 1840, the Forbidden City was heavily guarded

and not accessible to commoners.

Gates and walls were two principal features of the Forbidden

City in the past as they “shaped a city and made it meaningful”

(Wu, 1991: p. 86). Gates allowed a procession path to penetrate

the walls and linked separate parts into a continuum of space.

Walls in the Forbidden City not only encircled spaces from the

whole city down to repeated enclosures, but also, “dissected,

internalized and deepened space” (Zhu, 2004: p. 24). The walls

functioned as layers of barriers that repeatedly separated the

inside from the outside. In other words, walls gridded the whole

space while gates offered the circulation between different units

of the grid. By deepening and segmenting the space, the em-

peror would be concealed and protected by layers of walls.

Only high-rank officials, servants, people of the imperial house-

2Li is a unit of length, close to the scale of a mile.

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S. Q. ZHANG

hold and aristocrats, could reach the deep center of Beijing. The

emperor’s power was thus reinforced as the supreme arbiter by

the invisibility of his privacy and the myth of his capability.

The spatial strategies of the Forbidden City promoted an effec-

tive and automatic central control.

Zhu Jianfei, a well-known Chinese historian, likened the

Forbidden City to Bentham’s famous Panopticon proposal,

which was a meticulously planned prison: “at the periphery, an

annular building; at the center, a tower; this tower is pierced

with the wide windows open onto the inner side of the ring”

(Foucault, 1979: p. 157). Panopticon was used for surveillance

as there was an inequality in the views of people in the annular

building and the central tower. The criminals were in transpar-

ent prisons and under surveillance at all times. The institutional

arrangement was established through the asymmetry between

the inspector and the inspected.

The deepest and most invisible part of the Forbidden City

was in the far north section, it was comparable to a half of the

Panopticon. The northern end, where the emperor resided, was

equivalent to the Panopicon’s center power. In the deepest cen-

ter, the emperor could deliver his message and decrees to his

officers immediately. The communication between him and his

officers was strictly one way. The emperor obtained a pano-

ramic gaze on his subjects and his country from above. While

there was a gaze upon the outside, there was no visibility to the

court from the outside. The major effect of the Panopticon was

to induce in the inmate a state of the conscious and permanent

visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.

Similarly, the Forbidden City was also an apparatus of inducing

consciousness of power, a space inscribed with the network of

discipline.

The network of discipline was promoted by the grid of the

Forbidden City. The hierarchical grid promoted the subjects’

consciousness of social orders and persuaded them to employ

the rules of society to police themselves. Similar to the Forbid-

den City, the city of Beijing also displayed a centrality, sym-

metry and hierarchal spatial layout in its overall composition.

Different from Chang’an, where the imperial city was in the

very north, Beijing exhibited a three-walled city style. At the

center of the grid was the palace city, namely the Forbidden

City for the emperor and royal family. The next box was the

imperial city, which was an extension of the palace city. It in-

cluded royal gardens, altars, residential areas of noble families.

The largest enclosure was the capital city, which housed other

urban populations. There was an outer city attached to the capi-

tal city. The outer city was the most secular place in Beijing

where commercial activities were vibrant. Inside these urban

boxes or grids, city planners also subdivided the space into

small squares.

A hierarchy of center and periphery was represented in the

city planning of Beijing, sustaining a social and political order.

In the disposition of the City of Beijing, horizontal depth cor-

related to vertical height within the social hierarchy: the deeper

one was in the center of the city, the higher the position of that

person. In terms of Beijing geographic space, it was largely a

grid; while in terms of its social space, it resembled strictly a

pyramid. The sacred imperial ideologies were represented as

hierarchical disposition revealing an effective political domina-

tion. The grid in Beijing created islands and urban blocks, ar-

ticulating differences in social position. It related the geo-

graphic space to social space rather than promoting expansion.

As demonstrated by Chinese art historian, Wu Hung, “the

difference between imperial Beijing and its remote ancestor is

not its structure but its infinite horizontal expansion: walls and

gates were added and the central axis was elongated” (Wu,

1991: p. 87). For Wu Hung, temporary changes in city planning

were less significant than spatial stability and its elaborate

complexity as a whole. The reason why a culture would insis-

tently reject any fundamental change from the tradition in city

planning was rooted in the long lasting social orders through

Chinese history. The architectural structure paralleled the social

structure closely. As there was a hierarchical structure in soci-

ety, there was a hierarchical grid in city planning. The ancient

Chinese grid turned out to be the preventive mechanism, the

mechanism necessary to enable the emperor to become the

supreme ruler of the country.

Conclusion

To summarize, the American used grid as a means of under-

standing the border region as potential or actual site of occupa-

tion; the ancient Chinese understood it as universal discipline

and hierarchy. For Chinese, strategic geographical thinking

usually proved more important than mathematical accuracy. In

other words, mathematical accuracy was less important than a

strategic understanding of the land for a bio-geographic control.

Obedient human bodies were located in the city block within

the network of the grid. For Jefferson, with the expansive grid

was the fusing mechanism allowing expansion into the Ameri-

can West. With the mathematical accuracy of the grid, the

western landscape was informed by a realistic, scientific way of

viewing the land. It was self-consciously seen as having the

potential to assist in the expansion of political ideologies into

the new territories.

Jefferson’s anti-urban ideology was comparable to anti-elite

nationalism. In his influential 1893 essay The Significance of

the Frontier in American History, Frederick Jackson Turner

identified this point. He associated individualistic and egalitar-

ian qualities with the frontier spirit: “The frontier promoted the

formation of a composite nationality for the American people…

In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were American-

ized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race” (Linklater, 2002: p.

174). As a result, frontier people had a sense of themselves as

democratically inclined even though they might be deeply di-

vided by different regional identities along class lines. “The rise

of democracy was an effective force in the nation,” Turner

asserted, “… and it meant the triumph of the frontier” (Link-

later, 2002: p. 175). Despite its inherent inaccuracies pointed

out by later historians and geographers, Turner’s remarks

pointed out that the expansive instinct of American grid was

effective in building a coherent American nation that tran-

scended the regional and class divisions.

In contrast, the practices of urban planning in ancient China

symbolized the evaluative tactics of the elite. The hierarchical

grid was shaped within the most homogenized, traditional and

centralized socio-political elite ideologies of ancient China. The

underlying ideas of Records of Craftsmen of Zhou Rituals re-

sembled the principles of Zhou Li (Rituals of Zhou):

It is the sovereign alone who establishes the states of the

empire, gives to the four quarters their proper positions,

gives to the capital its form and to the fields their proper

divisions. He creates the offices and apportions their func-

tions in order to form a centre to which people may look

(Wright, 1997: pp. 45-47).

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506

The emperor of ancient China was the architect who de-

signed his political map and the mechanism of walling off

spaces. The idea of a nation was a centralized one, historically

personalized in the emperor himself. Thus the idea of national-

ism was essentially a concept confined to the emperor and those

educated elites around him. The masses were the object of the

nation rather than the subject of the nation. After all, the grid

was but one of many traditions invented by political elites in an

attempt to legitimize their rule. Elite nationalism and central-

ized grid became insufficient only when the political and eco-

nomic penetration of imperialistic powers reached such an ex-

tent that a mass movement was required to counter it. For the

ancient Chinese grid, it was a question of arranging within

oneself not accumulating for oneself.

If one compares the nation apparatus in the context of the

theory of checkerboard games, Chinese chess and Go, the rela-

tionship between repeated units and the overall strategies con-

cerned, Chinese grid was like Chinese chess. Chinese chess

pieces have eternal qualities: a king remains a king and a sol-

ider remains a solider. They are “coded; they have an internal

nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements,

situations and confrontations derive… Each is like a subject of

the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative

powers combine in a subject of enunciation” (Deleuze & Felix

Guattari, 1987: p. 352). The coded chess pieces move within

their “striated” landscape (Deleuze & Felix Guattari, 1987: p.

353). Their functions are structural and protecting the emperor

in the center. American grid evoked the strategies of Go. Go

pieces were deprived of all personalities and characteristics.

They are anonymous, collective and nomadic, moving on a

“smooth” space (Deleuze & Felix Guattari, 1987: p. 353). They

only have an environment of the exterior so they look for the

possibility of holding their own space and springing up at any

point and directi o n .

As addressed by Gilles Deleuze in his treatise on the war

machine: “The difference is that chess codes and decodes space,

whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing or

deterritorializing it… it seems that every morning, there are

more of [their pieces]” (Deleuze & Felix Guattari, 1987: pp.

351-352). On the politically inscribed landscapes, while China

emphasized the interior, America emphasized externalization as

its overall space increased in size. Ancient China epitomized

the idea of the nation being comprised of a few elites while

America constructed its nationalism by fusing the masses

through the grid system. If the geographically non-varying

landscape is a metaphor for a nation, the different notions of

grid plans mirror different approaches of constructing national-

ism and cultivating people.

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