Carto City

I still remember my experience of driving in Houston. It's such a highly symmetric layout of a city -- streets line horizontally and vertically, highways develop a shape of spiderweb and blocks after blocks stand there just like pixels on a computer screen. When I saw the tall buildings at downtown on the highway, I can't help saying "Oh, the CITY".

For driving, it's actually not bad to have a city mapped like this. But the more you have traveled in Houston, the more you are feeling that something is missing -- something that belongs to the long evolution of human civilization at one place. As my friend who lived at Houston said, "Houston is just a large collection of human residence. It is NOT like a city."

If you have played some city planning PC games you would have a better understanding of this. Whether it's to building a modern city in SimCity, or an ancient Roman one in Caesar, it's always a process of accumulation: make a small area of resident houses, build grocery store, market, etc. to support life, install theater, arena to enrich life, and so on.

If you don't have access to certain locations, you'd need to build roads to connect to them. But modern civilization has just gone too far. Highways make it no longer a problem if a place you need to visit often is several miles away. Thus, the layout of modern cities shows high degrees of function separation. Thus, we now have the word "downtown" (and "commute").