Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
This post is a sort of follow-up to the one from two weeks ago where I talked about the "gaps" in cities through which the true character of the underlying nature can be glimpsed. I think I underplayed the importance of location on the character of a city there; I ignored the obvious active role that geography plays in a city's construction, which is far more noticeable than the "gaps". I'll break down my thought process here; at its base I think that the location affects a city in two main ways:
First is through a city's fundamental "ratio vitae", that is why man settled there in the first place, which always has some foundation in the geography. There are two basic reasons to put a city anywhere, although most cities will have both qualities in varying amounts. They are "proximity to resources", and "proximity to trade". Given an empty map, humans will naturally congregate where there are plentiful resources. At first fresh-water, wood and arable land are key, with more specialised materials becoming more desired over time. Cities like Cardiff or Middlesborough attracted massive new populations once their respective resources of coal and iron ore became en-vogue, but still persist after that resource has mostly been exhausted or uneconomic to extract. Frontier cities like Russia's Novgorod or America's St Louis were built to serve as gates to the wild unknown, nodes to pull the dispersed material (and human) resources from their wide and sparse hinterlands. A resource such as "the wilderness" is quite clearly temporary, and as such these cities serve a temporary purpose. However cities rarely turn out to actually be temporary, and these places need to diversify and find new reasons to exist, even if their original purpose will always remain embedded at their core. The centre of the industrial ore extracting cities will forever retain their factory look, while the wool towns of Norfolk will keep their altogether more twee character, even as their purpose changes dramatically.
Cities which conversely grow out of "proximity to trade" naturally develop after "resource-cities" but generally grow larger than them. You could say they are built in proximity to the resource of cities themselves, and thus act as larger hubs through which several resource-cities pass their goods through to turn into profit. Such cities are usually built off existing traderoutes, either natural ones like rivers or coasts, or manmade ones like ancient roads, bridges or even modern paths like motor or rail-ways. Most of the biggest cities in human history have been of this sort, such as London, Paris or New York. I guess this is because there is no limit on their reason for growth; trade can continue to grow indefinitely while resource extraction cannot. But not all trade-cities are vast metropoleis, most are instead waypoints along longer routes. For example, if you look at the routes North out of London, you will find large towns at quite regular 20 mile intervals along radial routes out, this is approximately the distance traversable on foot in one day (provided proper roads). London-Luton-Northampton-Leicester-Nottingham-Mansfield-Sheffield-Wakefield-York is an example I can pick out. So these towns sprung up along the itineraries of traders as they travelled along the length of the country, stopping for rest every night en-route. Such patterns are common across the world, adapted to their prevailing circumstances. American cities, for example, are generally much more spaced out as they developed alongside more rapid forms of transport.
Second is the more literal construction of buildings. It wasn't until recently that we have had free rein to use whatever materials we like, instead cities were constructed with whatever material they happened to be built on top of. Again this can be split into three broad "genres" of material: wood, soil, and stone. Wood is the easiest material to build with, but is very quickly depleted unless a city is built next to otherwise unused forestland, which requires a lot of empty space. This is why wooden cities are found often in the expanses of the continental US, but nearly never in Europe (with the exceptions of the lightly-populated Scandinavian countryside and the tundra wastes of the Russian steppe). In England we occasionally see wooden towns, characterised by their wattle-and-daub half-timber exteriors, but these are remnants from an era when forests were more widespread. Stratford-upon-Avon for example was once at the limits of the Forest of Arden in the Tudor era and before, but this forest was entirely deforested for timber to build the growing Royal Navy, and Stratford as such transitioned to brick.
Second is "soil", which is a surprisingly versatile material but needs specific circumstances to be useful. One such circumstance is extreme heat, where mud blocks can be used without treatment to build quite durable mud-houses. In parts of the Sahel there are mud cities which have lasted centuries, but in the cooler temperate climes such basic construction techniques would simply not work. Instead we can fire our mud into bricks, making them far stronger and permanent. This itself requires clay-soils which are prevalent in areas of river deposition rather than those of erosion. Hence we find brick-building culture developing in the lowlands and floodplains of Southern England first, moving into the rougher landscapes of Northern England and the lowlands of Scotland & Wales with the advent of better firing techniques, but never quite reaching the more topographic extremities.
These regions instead use the final material, stone. Stone is the hardest of the three to work with, but obviously build the most lasting structures. Stone has the most variety, with different geologies providing very different aesthetics and ease-of-use. In the Cotswolds the softer limestone (along with lack of trees and thin soil) lends itself to the extensive use characteristic of the area. In the Highlands of Scotland the igneous geology helps with the harsh weather to build lasting structures. Aberdeen has its distinctive mica granite for example which sparkles in the light. As stone brings with it longevity and the associated prestige, many of our largest cities (and particularly capitals) go to great pains to obtain stone from far flung parts. Westminster is built from stone quarried across Britain, namely places like Portland or Bath, whose stones are some of the finest in the country. To build your city out of someone else's stone proves dominion over that place, and thus the decorated stone facades of London brought in from hundreds of leagues away across the country and empire themselves prove a point in their foreigness, just as the far-flung origins of the stones of Stonehenge did to our forefathers.
I think its beautiful to see a town hewn from the very geography it sits upon, blending in to its surroundings like it has existed since time immemorial. We lose something when we instead opt for distantly-sourced or synthesised materials for no better reason as "we want to", and its why so many have such strong indignation against the imposition of new foreign buildings on a city with an existing local character. It just makes sense to carry on such traditions for convenience as much as anything else, as usually to take the path of least resistance is the most natural choice.
