It is common to hear it said that a particular city – generally one of the American metropolises which has appeared in the last two centuries – “should not exist.” And indeed, as Urban Planner M. Nolan Gray writes A recent blog article“No city should to exist. “On the scale of human history, we have just started to build things, and we do not do it on a pure instinct. supposed be a city anywhere. They exist because we are going in existence. And we often do it in improbable contexts: “Half of Boston was flirted with the ocean. Saint-Louis only exists because we have tamed the largest river in our continent. Providing philadelphia with drinking water is an engineering feat on the scale of the Los Angeles aqueduct. »»
Apart from the United States, we see the same conditions surrounding “the largest cities never built: Tokyo and Saint Petersburg required from engineering exploits on the scale of everything seen in the United States. Amsterdam and Mexico literally built on water. “How was it managed in the particular case of the Dutch capital is explained in The new video of The current past at the top of the post, as well as in THE Obf video below.
The most striking feature in Amsterdam, its channels, was created so as not to look picturesque; in fact, as The current stepAnimator Jochem Boodt says, their construction was “a question of life and death”. Too soft for agriculture or the construction of houses, the swampy floor under the city on the Amstel river had to be drained; When drained, it has become subject to floods, which required construction dikes and a dam.
httv: //www.youtube.com/watch? V = MO3LLZKDAD0
This 13th century engineering project from jumping the AMSTEL protected the city and also gave it its name. The Amstel itself is, in fact, a huge channel, and the rapid expansion of the colony around it required to dig more and more auxiliary channels to help drainage, which defined space for the islands on which new districts (Style VeniceAt the top of the hundreds of thousands of posts led in the seabed). As indicated in the Obf Video, this distinctive urban structure dictated the forms of the houses of the city, with their universally narrow facades and their depths reflecting the richness of families inside. Now, four centuries after having taken its current form – and after having survived many crises inherent in its unusual situation and form – the center of Amsterdam is considered a paragon of town planning, sometimes imitated, but without original conditions in the same “impossible” way, never reproduced.
Related content:
The brilliant engineering that made Venice: how a city was built on the water
Rotterdam trip to Amsterdam in 10 minutes by boat: a 4K timelapse
Why Europe has so little skyscraper
Based in Seoul, Colin MArshall Written and broadcastTS on cities, language and culture. His projects include the substack newsletter Books on cities And the book The stateless city: a walk through Los Angeles from the 21st century. Follow it on the social network formerly known as Twitter in @ColinmArshall.
At Learnopoly, Finn has championed a mission to deliver unbiased, in-depth reviews of online courses that empower learners to make well-informed decisions. With over a decade of experience in financial services, he has honed his expertise in strategic partnerships and business development, cultivating both a sharp analytical perspective and a collaborative spirit. A lifelong learner, Finn’s commitment to creating a trusted guide for online education was ignited by a frustrating encounter with biased course reviews.