Hello Interactors,
Cities are layered by past priorities. I was just in Overland Park, Kansas, where over the last 25 years I’ve seen malls rise, fall, and shift outward as stores leave older spaces behind.
When urban systems shift — due to climate, capital, codes, or crisis — cities drift. These changes ripple across scales and resemble fractal patterns, repeating yet evolving uniquely.
This essay traces these patterns: past regimes, present signals, and competing questions over what's next.
URBAN SCRIPTS AND SHIFTING SCALES
As cities grow, they remember.
Look at a city’s form — the way its streets stretch, how its blocks bend, where its walls break. These are not neutral choices. They are residues of regimes. Spatial decisions shaped by power, fear, belief, or capital.
In ancient Rome, cities were laid out in strict grids. Streets ran along two axes: the cardo and decumanus. It made the city legible to the empire — easy to control, supply, and expand. Urban form followed the logic of conquest.
As cartography historian, O. A. W. Dilke writes,
“One of the main advantages of a detailed map of Rome was to improve the efficiency of the city's administration. Augustus had divided Rome into fourteen districts, each subdivided into vici. These districts were administered by annually elected magistrates, with officials and public slaves under them.”
In medieval Europe, cities got messy. Sovereignty was fragmented. Trade replaced tribute. Guilds ran markets as streets tangled around church and square. The result was organic — but not random. It reflected a new mode of life: small-scale, interdependent, locally governed.
In 19th-century Paris, the streets changed again. Narrow alleys became wide boulevards. Not just for beauty — for visibility and force. Haussmann’s renovations made room for troops, light, and clean air. It was urban form as counter-revolution.
Then came modernism. Superblocks, towers, highways. A form that made sense for mass production, cheap land, and the car. Planning became machine logic — form as efficiency.
Each of these shifts marked the arrival of a new spatial calculus — ways of organizing the built environment in response to systemic pressures. Over time, these approaches came to be described by urbanists as morphological regimes: durable patterns of urban form shaped not just by architecture, but by ideology, infrastructure, and power.
The term “morphology” itself was borrowed from biology, where it described the structure of organisms. In urban studies, it originally referred to the physical anatomy of the city — blocks, plots, grids, and streets. But today the field has broadened. It’s evolved into more of a conceptual lens: not just a way of classifying form, but of understanding how ideas sediment into space. Today, morphology tracks how cities are shaped — not only physically, but discursively and increasingly so, computationally.
Urban planning scholar Geoff Boeing calls urban form a “spatial script.” It encodes decisions made long ago — about who belongs where, what gets prioritized, and what can be seen or accessed.
Other scholars treated cities like palimpsests — a term borrowed from manuscript studies, where old texts were scraped away and overwritten, yet traces remained. In urban form, each layer carries the imprint of a former spatial logic, never fully erased.
Michael Robert Günter (M. R. G.) Conzen, a British geographer, pioneered the idea of town plan analysis in the 1960s. He examined how street patterns, plot divisions, and building forms reveal historical shifts. Urban geographer and architect, Anne Vernez Moudon brought these methods into contemporary urbanism. She argued that morphological analysis could serve as a bridge between disciplines, from planning to architecture to geography.
Archaeologist Michael E. Smith goes further. Specializing in ancient cities, Smith argues that urban form doesn’t just reflect culture — it produces it. In early settlements, the spatial organization of plazas, roads, and monuments actively shaped how people understood power, social hierarchy, and civic identity. Ritual plazas weren’t just for ceremony — they structured the cognitive and social experience of space.
Urban form, in this sense, is conceptual. It’s how a society makes its world visible. And when that society changes — politically, economically, technologically — so does its form. Not immediately. Not neatly. But eventually. Almost always in response to pressure from the outside.
INTERVAL AND INFLECTION
Urban morphology used to evolve slowly. But today, it changes faster — and with increasing volatility. Physicist Geoffrey West, and other urban scientists, describes how complex systems like cities exhibit superlinear scaling: as they grow, they generate more innovation, infrastructure, and socio-economic activity at an accelerating pace. But this growth comes with a catch: the system becomes dependent on continuous bursts of innovation to avoid collapse. West compares it to jumping from one treadmill to another — each one running faster than the last.
What once took centuries, like the rise of industrial manufacturing, is now compressed into decades or less. The intervals between revolutions — from steam power to electricity to the internet — keep shrinking, and cities must adapt at an ever-faster clip just to maintain stability. But this also breeds instability as the intervals between systemic transformations shrink. Cities that once evolved over centuries can now shift in decades.
Consider Rome. Roman grid structure held for centuries. Medieval forms persisted well into the Renaissance. Even Haussmann’s Paris boulevards endured through war and modernization. But in the 20th century, urban morphology entered a period of rapid churn. Western urban regions shifted from dense industrial cores to sprawling postwar suburbs to globalized financial districts in under a century — each a distinct regime, unfolding at unprecedented speed.
Meanwhile, rural and exurban zones transformed too. Suburbs stretched outward. Logistics corridors carved through farmland. Industrial agriculture consolidated land and labor. The whole urban-rural spectrum was redrawn — not evenly, but thoroughly — over a few decades.
Why the speed?
It’s not just technology. It’s the stacking of exogenous shocks. Public health crises. Wars. Economic crashes. Climate shifts. New empires. New markets. New media. These don’t just hit policy — they hit form.
Despite urbanities adaptability, it resists change. But when enough pressure builds, it breaks and fragments — or bends fast.
Quantitative historians like Peter Turchin describe these moments as episodes of structural-demographic pressure. His theory suggests that as societies grow, they cycle through phases of expansion and instability. When rising inequality, elite overproduction, and resource strain coincide, the system enters a period of fragility.
The ruling class becomes bloated and competitive, public trust erodes, and the state’s ability to mediate conflict weakens. At some point, the social contract fractures — not necessarily through revolution, but through cumulative dysfunction that demands structural transformation.
Cities reflect that process spatially. The street doesn’t revolt. But it reroutes. The built environment shows where power has snapped or shifted. Consider Industrial Modernity. Assuming we start in 1850, it took roughly 100 years before the next regime took shape — the Fordist-Suburban Expansion starting in roughly 1945. It took around 30-40 years for deregulation to hit in the 80s. By 1995 information, communication, and technology accelerated globalization, financialization, and the urban regime we’re currently in — Neoliberal Polycentrism.
Neoliberal Polycentricism may sound like a wonky and abstract term, but it reflects a familiar reality: a pattern of decentralized, uneven urban growth shaped by market-driven logics. While some scholars debate the continued utility of the overused term 'neoliberalism' itself, its effects on the built environment remain visible. Market priorities continue to dominate and reshape spatial development and planning norms.
It is not a wholly new spatial condition. It's the latest articulation of a longer American tradition of decentralizing people and capital beyond the urban core. In the 19th century, this dynamic took shape through the rise of satellite towns, railroad suburbs, and peripheral manufacturing hubs. These developments were often driven by speculative land ventures, private infrastructure investments, and the desire to escape the regulatory and political constraints of city centers.
The result was a form of urban dispersal that created new nodes of growth, frequently insulated from municipal oversight and rooted in socio-economic and racial segregation. This early polycentricism, like fireworks spawning in all directions from the first blast, set the stage for later waves of privatized suburbanization and regional fragmentation. Neoliberalism would come to accelerate and codify this expansion.
It came in the form of edge cities, exurbs, and special economic zones that proliferated in the 80s and 90s. They grew not as organic responses to demographic needs, but as spatial products of deregulated markets and speculative capital. Governance fragmented. Infrastructure was often privatized or outsourced. As Joel Garreau’s 1991 book Edge City demonstrates, a place like Tysons Corner, Virginia — a highway-bound, developer-led edge city — embodied this shift: planned by commerce, not civic vision. A decade later, planners tried to retrofit that vision — adding transit, density, and walkability — but progress has been uneven, with car infrastructure still shaping much of daily life.
This regime aligned with the rise of financial abstraction and logistical optimization. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman argue in Underground Empire, digital finance extended global capitalism’s reach by creating a networked infrastructure that allowed capital to move seamlessly across borders, largely outside the control of democratic institutions. Cities and regions increasingly contorted themselves to host these flows — rebranding, rezoning, and reconfiguring their form to attract global liquidity.
At the same time, as historian Quinn Slobodian notes, globalism was not simply about market liberalization but about insulating capital from democratic constraint. This logic played out spatially through the proliferation of privatized enclaves, special jurisdictions, and free trade zones — spaces engineered to remain separate from public oversight while remaining plugged into global markets.
In metro cores, this led to vertical Central Business Districts, securitized plazas, and speculative towers. In the suburbs and exurbs, it encouraged the low-density, car-dependent landscapes that still propagate. It’s still packaged as freedom but built on exclusion. In rural zones, the same logic produces logistics hubs, monoculture farms, and fractured small towns caught precariously between extraction and abandonment.
SEDIMENT AND SENTIMENT
What has emerged in the U.S., and many other countries, is a fragmented patchwork: privatized downtowns, disconnected suburbs, branded exurbs, and digitally tethered hinterlands…often with tax advantages. All governed by the same regime, but expressed through vastly different forms.
We’re in a regime that promised flexibility, innovation, and shared global prosperity — a future shaped by open markets, technological dynamism, and spatial freedom. But that promise is fraying. Ecological and meteorological breakdown, housing instability, and institutional exhaustion are revealing the deep limits of this model.
The cracks are widening. The pandemic scrambled commuting rhythms and retail flows that reverberate to this day. Climate stress reshapes assumptions about where and how to build. Platforms restructure access to space as AI wiggles its way into every corner. Through it all, the legitimacy of traditional planning models, even established forms of governing, weakens.
Some historians may call this an interregnum — a space between dominant systems, where the old still governs in form, but its power to convince has faded. The term comes from political theory, describing those in-between moments when no single order fully holds. It's a fitting word for times like these, when spatial logic lingers physically but loses meaning conceptually.
The dominant spatial logic remains etched in roads, zoning codes, and skylines — but its conceptual scaffolding is weakening. Whether seen as structural-demographic strain or spatial realignment, this is a moment of uncertainty.
The systems that once structured urban life — zoning codes, master plans, market forecasts — may no longer provide a stable map. And that’s okay. Interregnums, as political theorist Christopher Hobson reminds us, aren’t just voids between orders — they are revealing. Moments when the cracks in dominant systems allow us to see what had been taken for granted. They offer space to reflect, to experiment, and to reimagine.
Maybe what comes next is less of a plan and more of a posture — an attitude of attentiveness, humility, and care. As they advise when getting sucked out to sea by a rip tide: best remain calm and let it spit you out where it may than try to fight it.
Especially given natural laws of scale theory suggests these urban rhythms are accelerating and their transitions are harder to anticipate. Change may not unfold through neat stages, but arrive suddenly, triggered by thresholds and tipping points. Like unsuspectingly floating in the warm waters of a calm slack tide, nothing appears that different until rip tide just below the surface reveals everything is.
In that sense, this drifting moment is not just prelude — it is transformation in motion. Cities have always adapted under pressure — sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly. But they rarely begin anew. Roman grids still anchor cities from London to Barcelona. Medieval networks persist beneath tourist maps and tangled streets. Haussmann’s boulevards remain etched across Paris, shaping flows of traffic and capital. These aren’t ghosts — they’re framing. Living sediment.
Today’s uncertainty is no different. It may feel like a void, but it’s not empty. It’s layered. Transitions build on remnants, repurposing forms even as their meanings shift. Parcel lines, zoning overlays, server farms, and setback requirements — these are tomorrow’s layered manuscripts — palimpsests.
But it's not just physical traces we inherit. Cities also carry conceptual ones — ideas like growth, public good, infrastructure, or progress that were forged under earlier regimes.
As historian Elias Palti reminds us, concepts are not fixed. They are contingent, born in conflict, and reshaped in uncertainty. In moments like this, even the categories we use to interpret urban life begin to shift. The city, then, is not just a built form — it's a field of meaning. And in the cracks of the old, new frameworks begin to take shape. The work now is not only to build differently, but to think differently too.
REFERENCES
Dilke, O. A. W. (1985). Greek and Roman Maps. Cornell University Press.
Boeing, Geoff. (2019). “Spatial Information and the Legibility of Urban Form.” Journal of Planning Education and Research, 39(2), 208–220.
Conzen, M. R. G. (1960). “Alnwick, Northumberland: A Study in Town Plan Analysis.” Institute of British Geographers Publication.
Moudon, Anne Vernez. (1997). “Urban Morphology as an Emerging Interdisciplinary Field.” Urban Morphology, 1(1), 3–10.
Smith, Michael E. (2007). “Form and Meaning in the Earliest Cities: A New Approach to Ancient Urban Planning.” Journal of Planning History, 6(1), 3–47.
West, Geoffrey. (2017). Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies. Penguin Press.
Turchin, Peter. (2016). Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History. Beresta Books.
Garreau, Joel. (1991). Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. Doubleday.
Farrell, Henry, & Newman, Abraham. (2023). Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy. Henry Holt.
Slobodian, Quinn. (2023). Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. Metropolitan Books.
Hobson, Christopher. (2015). The Rise of Democracy: Revolution, War and Transformations in International Politics since 1776. Edinburgh University Press.
Palti, Elias José. (2020). An Archaeology of the Political: Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. Columbia University Press.
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