THE THIRD WAVE
The Second Wave of change also brought with it a multiplication and sharpening of spatial boundaries. Until the eighteenth century the boundaries of empires were often imprecise. Because vast areas were unpopulated, precision was unnecessary. As population rose, trade increased, and the first factories began to spring up around Europe, many governments began systematically to map their frontiers.Customs zones were more clearly delineated. Local and even private properties came to be more carefully defined, marked, fenced, and recorded. Maps became more detailed, inclusive, and standardized.
A new image of space arose that corresponded exactly to the new image of time. As punctuality and scheduling set more limits and deadlines in tune, more and more boundaries cropped up to set limits in space. Even the linearization of time had its spatial counterpart.
In preindustrial societies straight-line travel, whether by land or sea, was an anomaly. The peasant’s path, the cow path or Indian trail, all meandered according to the lay of the land. Many walls curved, bulged, or went off at irregular angles. The streets of medieval cities folded in on one another, curved, twisted, convoluted.
Second Wave societies not only put ships on exact straight-line courses, they also built railroads whose shining tracks stretched in parallel straight lines as far as the eye could see. As the American planning official Grady Clay has noted, these rail lines (the term itself is a giveaway) became the axis off which new cities, built on grid patterns, took shape. The grid or gridiron pattern, combining straight lines with ninety-degree angles, lent a characteristic machine regularity and linearity to the landscape.
Even now in looking at a city one can see a jumble of streets, squares, circles, and complicated intersections in the older districts. These frequently give way to neat gridirons in those parts of the city built hi later, more industrialized periods. The same is true for whole regions and countries.
Even farm land began, with mechanization, to show linear patterns. Preindustrial farmers, plowing behind oxen, created curvy, irregular furrows. Once the ox had started, the farmer did not want to stop him and the beast curved wide at the end of the furrow, forming a kind of S-curve pattern hi the land. Today anyone looking out the window of an airplane sees squared off fields with ruler-straight plow marks.
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