city grids c/d

http://i48.tinypic.com/2l95x53.png

There are few things more depressing to me than trudging up a perfectly straight city street.

must be miserable to be a flâneur in new york

I voted 'something in between' but actually I think I do prefer 'mediaeval'.

Grids can be boring as fuck, but otoh, I'm hugely impressed when a city manages to something interesting with a grid.

Something in-between, tbh.

i don't know that i've encountered any proper grid layouts, seeing that i've never left the uk nor been to any of the particularly griddy new towns. i'm sure it'd be nice to not really have to have faith in my non-existent sense of direction (dunno how many times i took wrong turns and ran into dead ends when visiting york earlier this year), but utter homogeneity is a hefty price to pay.

I was introduced yesterday to a public thoroughfare in London - yellow lines 'n' all - that runs through the cellars of a now demolished John Adam terrace, some original brickwork vaulting still visible.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/arts/design/manhattan-street-grid-at-museum-of-city-of-new-york.html

some cool mapz

I think I'd get tired of all the short, interrupted sight lines if there was no grid whatsoever...I need to stretch my gaze out and see some sweeping views, give the city a feeling of majesty, of being arranged according to a giant's scale. But then you have to come down from that and be able to live and walk comfortably right at ground level, too.

So...something in between, I guess.

haussmann-esque blvds can get you sweeping views without a grid

http://www.canvasreplicas.com/images/Avenue%20de%20L%20Opera,%20Paris%20Camille%20Pissarro.jpg

I actually prefer oldschool grids over suburban cul de sacs where "Deer Hills Court" intersects with "Deer Pond Circle" tbh.

voted medieval, grids are for noobs

ya but basically everyone agrees suburban cul de sacs are a low point in human history and culture, so they're not an option here

I don't like to spend time getting places, I like BEING at them already, so really medieval is never going to win with me. Straight lines, baby.

Everything else is time-between; as Christopher Robin says, "It isn't really anywhere / it's somewhere else, instead."

ya but basically everyone agrees suburban cul de sacs are a low point in human history and culture, so they're not an option here

― iatee, Tuesday, January 3, 2012 5:58 PM (35 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Not everybody.

sth inbetween

literally everybody

fact

They are so good.

haha, what about giant fucking arterials with random, non-connecting squiggles in between

though i guess even then you can have gridded or non gridded arterials

I feel that I can get lost metaphorically in a city without the frightening experience of being actually lost. Grids are a great idea. I'll take the street layout of NYC over that of London any day. As if London needs to be more overwhelming a place to be without literally going around in circles.

whatever new york is. "something in between" leaning toward grid i guess

mostly grid with odd pockets of non-grid

medieval is "fun" but only if there are like medieval buildings there too. the idea of medieval whorls combined w/ new condos makes me want to barf

I love the Chicago grid and find it v. comforting.

yeah learning how to drive around a city in Baltimore was very helpful because it has such a consistent grid. Washington is i guess pretty griddy too but there are so many things about it that still confuse or intimidate me that i don't dare drive around it without GPS.

jaymc otm

a patchwork of grids. i have no idea what medieval would even be like tbh, if i lived somewhere like that i doubt i'd even own a car.

i live in a very griddy city. what is the griddiest city?

all our streets are (number) (directional), with the directional being what direction the street is from the mormon temple and the number how far.

I don't think there is a way to measure griddiest. something western and flat, probably. downtown sacramento's pretty good:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=sacramento+&hl=en&ll=38.575246,-121.487718&spn=0.019627,0.038581&sll=40.684283,-111.974459&sspn=0.038076,0.077162&vpsrc=6&hnear=Sacramento,+California&t=h&z=15

With the exception of a few streets (fewer than the number of your fingers), Chicago is madly straight, perfectly N/S grid from Evanston to Indiana.

Wow, not only is downtown Sacramento pretty griddy, the street names are also 1st St., 2nd St., etc. crossed by A St., B St., etc.

salt lake city's grid is next-level in the sense that it isn't determined by or built around a geographic landmark of any kind and the grid always conforms to absolute directions. also, the streets are insanely wide. it's like living in a slightly deranged thought.

even the freeways here are griddy

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=salt+lake+city,+ut&hl=en&ll=40.719941,-111.853523&spn=0.143894,0.338173&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=38.41771,86.572266&vpsrc=6&hnear=Salt+Lake+City,+Salt+Lake,+Utah&t=m&z=12

i think it's crazy judging grids on a purely aesthetic basis, if you don't like straight lines or right angles or w/e. i have no sense of direction but the idea that i can be on 2nd and 2nd & know where 99th & 10th is even though i've never been there is a huge, transformative part of how you use a city (i realise this is technically specific to nyc/portland style grids with alphanumeric naming but i think it's prob true without, also, to some degree). there is charm to medieval cities sure but being able to know where i am trumps specifically enjoying the block i'm on, imo.

yeah but if you've lived there for a long time you'd know regardless

i think that's a weird caveat though, because i-guess-maybe, yes, but then maybe not, alphanumerics seeming a more comprehensive way to map out a city than experience, what with all its demographic foibles. & it's useful for people who either just got there or don't necessarily know a place corner to corner, which is a p broad church of important if ephemeral denizens. like i say i have zero sense of direction so maybe i'm more sensitive to it but i think it is a pretty big deal & prob has a big effect on what life & circulation around a city is like

right, there's an element of instant mobility to a grid that's comforting and a bit alarming at the same time. space seems so instantly masterable (and is) when it's cartesian. it's kind of a drug imo.

xp

i think it is a pretty big deal & prob has a big effect on what life & circulation around a city is like

i think it's a huge deal.

I like grids overcome by geography, Los Angeles style, so somewhere in between.

i like the twin cities a lot (duh): mostly a grid but broken up by plenty of hills, rivers and lakes; street naming conventions that are haphazard, alphabetical for a while, then not, names repeated in different places, directional nicknames for difft parts of the city that don't have stable relationships to each other, and a totally batshit house numbering system in st paul that i've never seen anyone try to explain.

are grids somehow more democratic? they're definitely better suited to modern capitalism.

love this article: http://www.scribd.com/doc/13129884/Geertz-Bazaar-Economy

i have a faint feeling that grids are definitely an 'enlightenment' kind of a thing, with all the dark napoleonic and indian-killing ish baked in

nb i like grids, feel like there's no way back, but some grids take it ~too far~

http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20101218122228/tron/images/thumb/4/47/Grid.jpg/145px-Grid.jpg

i have no sense of direction but the idea that i can be on 2nd and 2nd & know where 99th & 10th is even though i've never been there is a huge, transformative part of how you use a city (i realise this is technically specific to nyc/portland style grids with alphanumeric naming but i think it's prob true without, also, to some degree)

Chicago has a system whereby most major streets in the grid are exactly one mile and also 800 street numbers apart, with the downtown intersection of State/Madison serving as the 0/0 coordinate. Once you internalize some of the other coordinates (e.g., Belmont is 3200 North, Ashland is 1600 West), it becomes very easy to locate an address. If I need to get to 1800 W. Belmont, I know automatically that it's a quarter-mile west of Ashland and the same distance east of Damen. (Having lived here for 10+ years, I also know that the cross street is probably Ravenswood.)

I like LA's clashing grids, and was reading about how it came to be fairly recently, but can't remember the reason or where I read it.

(from 1917, pic may be too large)

http://www.mapcruzin.com/free-state-maps/states/california/los_angeles_1917.jpg

love l a

this thread makes me want to play simcity so badly

sim city vs. civilization

Chicago has a system whereby most major streets in the grid are exactly one mile and also 800 street numbers apart, with the downtown intersection of State/Madison serving as the 0/0 coordinate. Once you internalize some of the other coordinates (e.g., Belmont is 3200 North, Ashland is 1600 West), it becomes very easy to locate an address

see exactly, turning a city into a logarithm grid is good education policy. yeah i think this is super useful & connective.

it's good for public transit / 'efficiency' too but arguably not as good for people walking aroun / 'neighborhoods' / other intangibles

and london and tokyo seem to do alright without efficiency gains from a strict grid

this thread makes me want to play simcity so badly

Me too now, and I cant find the damn install CD anywhere :(

I like grids, becase I have a shithouse sense of direction. Melb CBD is a small grid, and a large chunk has a neat naming schema (King, William, Queen, Elizabeth) that made it v easy for me to get around when I moved here.

and london and tokyo seem to do alright without efficiency gains from a strict grid

i am gonna make this thread way too personal if encouraged, but, trying to speak as broadly as possible, i think a strength of nyc versus london is the integration of public transport and the street system. i don't know if 'democratic', mentioned upthread, is going too far, but i feel like there is something kind of unifying and levelling about much of a place being part of the same system - is London the best example of a cross-pollinating, flexible and malleable city?, idk. nyc, across various degrees of grid-style design, also does p well on the 'neighbourhoods' index.

what do you mean integration of public transit and street system?

by

sorry- i mean that the nyc subway map corresponds to a geography of the overground streets - so 14th street stop is at 14th & 6th street, where as 'archway' isn't at a location that can be perceived in relation to another - it isn't self-evidently x blocks north of a different stop - nor necessarily is it identifiable as a specific centre or useful point, the way a cross-street is. i mean that the nyc map clicks with & relies on the same principles you use to navigate a city on foot.

again that seems only important to someone who's new. most people are probably not inconvenienced on a daily basis because most people go relatively few places.

also w/ smartphones/modern technology easy mental maps aren't as essential.

again that seems only important to someone who's new. most people are probably not inconvenienced on a daily basis because most people go relatively few places.

idk though. i wish there was some kind of awesome interactive boldly colour-coded map on the times site, revealing the distance most people travel outside of their key locations on a daily basis, breaking up demographically the trips that are made from one side of the city to the other. i used to live in new york & i feel like i was probably readier to take trips that were drawn with the lines of the grid system, so knowing that i was going four blocks south & one east to a restaurant/stationer/to get something, because i knew how long it would take and exactly, on childproof autopilot, where i was going, which - like again i'm sorta universalising my awful sense of direction, here - i don't think you totally do if you're in the medieval (we keep saying medieval, is that the right term, is it not dutch) system, which just requires a little more attention or which is a little spacier when it comes to pinpointing a street number, etc. i feel like 'most people go to relatively few places' doesn't totally encompass movements in and around those places - whether we move around more if we know better where we are - and i feel like 'someone who's new' undervalues an active demographic in a lot of big cities - a bunch of people in london and in new york are 'new' in some regard, a huge number if you're calling "the group who doesn't have a familiarity with the city", gauged by streetname-by-streetname knowledge, even if only of a certain area, new. i am someone who would raze st. paul's cathedral for the reassuring ease of a grid system, but even so i feel like a lot of london would be more within reach if it was instantly, obviously perceivable as being a certain distance & direction away, in a way that it isn't if it's a few unadjacent street turns away.

also w/ smartphones/modern technology easy mental maps aren't as essential.

this is paradigm-shiftingly true i think & might well unfurl any semblance of sense in my arguments within one to three years

a huge % of the jobs, cultural activities, shopping etc. in the nyc region are in midtown and so people are quite often 'close' to other parts of the grid to begin with. but people seem fairly willing to go to the west village, confusing streets or no.

sometimes I think the grid *prevents* people from actually going out and seeing things. 98th and 3rd is just a

er accidentally hit post

sometimes I think the grid *prevents* people from actually going out and seeing things. 98th and 3rd is just a vague concept for most people, a geographic marker, and sure you can figure out the neighborhood even if you haven't been there, but there's no particular reason why you'd want to go there unless you needed to and the fact that you know how to get there doesn't change that.

But that's no different than a medieval layout. If there's no specific reason to travel outside your normal space you won't do it. Unless you're saying an odd street layout invites exploring.

I think it does

I also think I'm basing this too much on 2011-era manhattan cause 1920 manhattan probably invited a lot more exploring

I think some spare time and wondering what else your city has to offer is the impetus.

Although I guess medieval layout = old city = old buildings = more interesting to look at.

yeah that's true

even as someone who has spent like a half hour trying to re-find taim in the west village around that whole crease-in-the-map area it still seems kinda orderly enough compared to places that don't run along numbered streets & aves. but i know, people go downtown & do okay.

idg the thing about a grid preventing people from going somewhere - i mean even if "buttercup street" might be more alluring or seem more exotic, a grid ref is going to be contextualised by its neighbourhood. i know i am abusing the kinda jane jacobs angle itt & reducing it to I LIKE TO GO TO NEW DELIS?, but maybe some of it is specific to london, which i always thought, because of the underground & because of the delineation between areas, seems to exist as a bunch of isolated & disparate areas, rather than neighbourhoods rubbing up against each other. i am not promoting the ease of taking a walk to some faraway part of town just because it exists (i totally am but that's not the point), i just think that there's a connectivity with a grid that orders the city as a measurable, accessible thing, & that this isn't as palpable otherwise.

Although I guess medieval layout = old city = old buildings = more interesting to look at.

yeah this is true, but accepting this means grid people get to flex grid system = new city = cool gunslinging kids & day-glo arcades at every corner = all the better to go prop a leg against the wall at

It is my understanding that the first town laid out in a grid was the Piraeus, which is the port of Athens, back in circa 500 BC.

afaics, a perfect gridded city plan only happens where a city is built on level ground. Real hills (as opposed to gentle swales and rises) don't submit to grids. I'm not a fan of flatland cities. Less griddy for me, plz.

Guys, I am sad to say one of my closest friends lives in the middle of this abomination:
http://f.cl.ly/items/2S3T2T3V032s1s0J0y1t/culdeabomination.png

They're like cul de sacs, but with... a little green space in the middle. That isn't really used, but association fees (!!) pay for its upkeep.

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/images/10537_100155.jpg

Grids

Chicago's is super griddy, but it's broken up by some slight curves, diagonals, and dead-ends, so it doesn't feel like

http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20101218122228/tron/images/thumb/4/47/Grid.jpg/145px-Grid.jpg

Would live in Tronworld tbh

Nice balance, IMO.

http://i.imgur.com/sC8Yq.jpg

http://www.porhomme.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/human-landscapes-from-above-jason-hawkes-main.jpg

a lot of cities on rivers have a two-grid deal where part of the town is oriented to the water and the rest nesw

Oh man this topic is one I've thought abt many times before. What are some good books to read abt the layout and development of city roads?

I live in an extremely griddy city (Philadelphia) but we have nice diagonals every once in a while that make for pretty nifty shortcuts. It makes biking around really easy coz you can quickly figure out how far apart shit is.

My vote for griddiet city of all is Tucson

I still get lost in the West Village after 30 years bcz it's one of the few places in Manhattan that isn't gridded.

Walking in DC is a huge pain in the ass w/ all those circles.

i have a faint feeling that grids are definitely an 'enlightenment' kind of a thing, with all the dark napoleonic and indian-killing ish baked in

― goole, Tuesday, January 3, 2012 6:59 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i have talked about this on another thread somewhere but a college friend wrote his thesis on some slightly more theory-y version of this thing, but also w/r/t the way income and property values correlate w/ griddiness--suburban cul-de-sacs vs. urban grids etc. would be interesting to re-theorize as money moves out of the suburbs and back into the cities.

not just not gridded, it has w4, w10, w11, w12 there just to fuck with you

still nothing compared to queens

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=queens&hl=en&ll=40.731145,-73.895524&spn=0.011756,0.018218&sll=40.734787,-74.00322&sspn=0.011755,0.018218&vpsrc=6&hnear=Queens,+New+York&t=m&z=16

The most walking I do in Queens is usually from Steinway St to the Moving Image Museum, or within Citi Field.

there is lots of interesting walking in queens but none of it is on the above map

am into any area in which you orientate around quick brown fox triangle

Grids great if you're a tourist and don't know your way around. Crap if you live there and do, surely, because they are so dull.

When I first went to NYC, a helpful local advised me I might easily get lost downtown, where the grid ended. I explained that I was from Europe, and non-grid cities did not worry me in the slightest.

Grids were a Scottish rationalist thing originally, weren't they - developed in the 1760s for the new towns in Edinburgh and Glasgow. And later brought to their apotheosis in Milton Keynes (where I do get lost because the naming system seems so fucking mental).

le corbusier didn't have the luxury of cleared (cleansed?) land, did he ;)

grids predate scottish rationalism by a long while

^^ see my post above in re: Piraeus.

Crap if you live there and do, surely, because they are so dull.

i wish there were two TOTALLY ANALOGOUS cities, one which had a grid & one which didn't, because i can't really understand a 'this is boring' argument without wanting to caveat 'except in circumstances which it's interesting', like it depends so much & i think 'higgledy piggledy trumps linear' is pretty subjective. feel like there is a sub-discussion here that takes into account those theories about how old courtyards were designed with the basic parameters of human vision in mind, so not extending further than 100m, etc, but that would probably not take us anywhere.

even aesthetically though i am into grids, what you get from straight lines, etc

http://www.solarnavigator.net/geography/geography_images/Madison_Avenue_New_York_City_looking_north.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_5O6WbyZDz5c/SEAFdMu6PHI/AAAAAAAAAsM/wMVT4bfPxSg/s1600-h/buildings.jpg

http://artcritical.com/appel/images/frank_med.jpg, sorta

the second one should open-in-a-new-tab if you're inclined though be forewarned it is art

And later brought to their apotheosis in Milton Keynes (where I do get lost because the naming system seems so fucking mental).

iirc even MK, probably the griddiest town in England (was going to say UK but don't know about Scottish rationalists), is only on a grid for a square mile or so at the centre; the suburbs are modern Barratt Homes-esque cul-de-sacs, roundabout-packed sprawl of industrial estates, or the ex-village side roads of Bletchley

(I may be exaggerating here as I've mainly just got lost on the edge of town looking for Ikea, apart from a single visit to the centre)

it's also worth noting that most of the griddy streets in america get their feel and character from the fact that they are very wide as much as from their geometry, and there's nothing that mandates that a grid be coupled w/ wide streets

Grids were a Scottish rationalist thing originally, weren't they

I seriously doubt that the Scots were the first people to think of straight lines. That said, I do live in a neighborhood where every street has a Scottish name. I line on Balmoral, the next street up is Bryn Mawr, and on and on. Apparently the planner of this neighborhood got the names not straight from Scotland, but from Philadelphia. Things travel pretty far, and for weird reasons.

there's nothing that mandates that a grid be coupled w/ wide streets

See: Lower Manhattan.

Only boring people are bored by grids.

^

It sure made delivering pizza easy, though in theory, I can't stand the idea of an address that's "100 10th Street NE" belonging to the same town as a "100 10th Street SE".

And it's always weird (Kansas City is like this) to be driving out in the sticks and come across "238th Street".

There were rural roads in the middle of nowhere in northern Calif. with numbers like that -- weird. Turn right at 108th St. in the middle of an almond grove.

Why the hell would someone vote grids? Hasn't the last 50 years of Urbanism been about Grids being all LOL-dehumanizing-modernist-fetishism-of-reason-gone-awry?

Like, you're not supposed to experience cities that way.

i def see the aesthetic appeal of the medieval chaotic city plan but from a navigational standpoint grids are the obv way to go, this whole argument is basically utility vs. aesthetics. though it's actually more "old city vs. new city" because any new city, even with a non-grid-based plan, is going to be very griddy due to how buildings look these days, power lines, etc.

Like, you're not supposed to experience cities that way.

can you unpack this even a little bit though. i feel like everyone else's medieval village perambulations are punctuated by some kind of regular, hugely satisfying epiphanies that i don't know about. like you turn a corner & are suddenly met by a wall of balloons, or you come to picturesque, fairytale style forks in the roads. is it just nice slinking around & taking corners or what.

grid is just how the city is laid out, you could have a grid system but like dr. seuss buildings and treehouses and man-made caves within the grid and it wouldn't be your soul-crushing urbanism stereotype

Like I said, I can get lost in a city without getting lost in a city.

Grids are a product a modernist urban planning that's super-entrenched in a type of thinking that holds reason and rationality supreme, and hence sees reason as the dominant principle by which to order life and space. This modernist fetishism of reason - and hence of geometry and order - translates into attempts to force human living patterns into an arbitrary grid system that has less to do with the human interactions and movements in the city, and how humans generally use the city, than with a myopic ideal constructed around a fantasy of order.

Grids are all about the systematization in life, and are coincidentally, a product of the same mindset as bureaucratic capitalism. The grid is the urban analogue of Fordism, it is an ideology.

Having moved from a semi-grid city (Toronto) to London (not a grid city), I can say that my experiences of the latter are a lot more vibrant. It's hard to measure the extent to which grids are dehumanizing, since its hard to separate them from the same modern social relations and production of space that they come from.

and are UNCOINCIDENTALLY a product of modern bureaucratic capitalism, etc. etc.

cool, that must be why no grid cities produce any culture or knowledge of any value, always wondered about that, thanks

No, thank you for your incisive reading of my post, and for producing such an insightful reading, because that's totally what I said.

if only it was possible for a city to have it both ways

urban planning of any kind is all about systematizing human interaction and movement, doesn't matter if it's grid-based or not. if you think living in a city with roundabouts means you're less locked in to bureaucratic capitalism then you're kidding yourself

i mean if i wanted to spout some grad student nonsense, i could say non-grid cities are all about obscuring and obfuscation, about the powers-that-be trying to prevent the populace from seeing clearly and being able to navigate their lives

owned

That's not what I'm saying. Please read (and think) about what I write before creating ridiculous straw-man arguments. I'm saying grids are historically founded in a certain modernist mindset that is itself deeply problematic, and has informed a certain way of producing space that conforms to that. If you think that means "no grid cities produce any culture or knowledge of any value," or that non grid cities somehow resist capitalism then I have no fucking idea what you're on about.

Then again, I'm a grad student, so the fact that I'm not spouting ahistorical nonsense based on "common sense" observation discounts what I say. Sorry, next time I won't attempt to do any sort of thoughtful critique.

you guys

what do you mean by 'modernist'? grids have existed for a long time and are more just a natural result of 'planning' of any sort

Cause it's not like this has been a huge issue in, y'know, actual practices and discourses of Urban Planning over the last 50 years.

http://sammybrother.wikispaces.com/file/view/Revolutionary_War.jpg/183892881/Revolutionary_War.jpg

gabbedb

Xpost: That's not exactly true, This is basically the difference between cities like London and Paris vs New York. You're not going to find cities from before the 16th century, to be safe, based on grids, but around practical usage and urban growth. To actually design a city around a grid as a systematic structure is a product of modernist thinking (defined as a certain worldview growing out of enlightenment thinking that privileges, among other things, reason, order and geometry), as is the idea of seeing the grid as a self-evident, "natural" phenomenon.

Ha, that's xpost to iatee, not the civil war.

Abe Lincoln OTM!

If I'm not mistaken, Timothy "Speed" Levitch rails righteously against Manhattan's grid system in the movie The Cruise. This is either shortly before or shortly after he rails righteously against being left out of an orgy.

a subway system isn't a self-evident natural phenomenon either

fuck GIS imo

Sorry to be all "someone on the internet is wrong!" but one last thing:

A subway system isn't a self evident natural phenomenon cause it's...not. It's planned, like a city. Don't see your point.

And yeah, there are obviously non-grid cities that are designed based on control, too. But that hardly discounts the way grids work. The idea is the ways they are consciously planned, and the ways that planning is legitimized/informed.

Grid-based street layouts are not Soviet housing, ffs.

you're not going to find cities from before the 16th century, to be safe, based on grids, but around practical usage and urban growth

enh 'but' is itself p problematic here

paris was redesigned by force! wtf

the point of a grid is to have a plan that isn't really a "plan". it continues on no matter who is in charge or making decisions in the future. the initial gridding of new york was just done with a ruler iirc.

it's definitely from a time period when people could being to imagine a city growing very quickly. and happening in a place where that growth was happening on "empty" land, starting from scratch i.e. not europe.

i am glad there are some rebuttals going on here but just speaking broadly for a moment, edb, if the nazis invented the garbage can where would you put your trash

http://oldcarandtruckpictures.com/Volkswagen/1949VolkswagenBeetle-ad2.jpg

a product of the same mindset as national socialism

HEY Y'ALL
http://api.ning.com/files/i5Tgy-v3jykTd7wAXt1LXeAbgtk2iMLY1mRvsOw5fNcA9gqtBXSyntED9fYydSeDB76HqKWW-qfleSWSSiQ0XD*VPgNG1HjU/StrawMan.jpg

And for the record, I refuse to so much as take trains that run on time.

just spitballin here. plenty of extant cities from ancient times on every continent were grids.

but in feudal europe, political control was tenuous and elites needed populations tied to rural land. cities were allowed to happen at the suffrance of the sovereign, grudgingly, under charter to keep urban liberties under wraps, and within walls to protect from inevitable political breakdown. growth was haphazard and often reversed by fire, disease and war. the emergent shape of a city was determined not just by its contest against a landscape but against a regime. once european political entities grew in size and power ("problematic," sure) to see and plan in greater distances of time and space, people got to go back to building in grids again

i just don't see the non-grid as evidence of vibrancy or organic development, nor the grid of an ideology of control. probably closer to the opposite, if i had to put them on a polarity. which i'd rather not.

i went to grad school too

I like grids

I grew up in philly and cities that don't have grids feel hostile

the west village can float off into a bonfire

Grids that don't align with the cardinal directions may be worse than the most curlicue streets on earth.

there's a great post that steve shasta wrote about tokyo's street numbering system somewhere here on ILX

http://g.co/maps/868uw

damn british

the other option is to make a grid that's like a 2x2, and then just build.... vertically

HK is a hilly island! can't get too griddy there

islands

yah but look at places that aren't islands

http://g.co/maps/gt8jz

i dont think its that out of line (lol) to say that even if grids werent intended or didnt originate as "mechanisms of control," they can be/have become that in effect? you could write some real wankery about this if u wanted--their "openness" is both freeing and prone to control or what have you

a time period when people could being to imagine a city growing very quickly

I think this is an urgent & key concept, but this time period this happened quite early on in the mediterranean region. I have already mentioned the Piraeaus. Another well-known example would be Alexandria in Egypt, where Alexander is said to have laid out the city plan by walking around empty ground in the Nile littoral, tracing the outlines of streets.

The fact of large cities consciously founding off-shoot colonies, like Carthage or Croton, meant that city planning was part of those colonies from the beginning.

I thought grids lend more to people taking a larger variety of streets and thus encourage foot traffic, commerce, and mixed-usage neighborhoods? If you have "merge" points then they either lead to people taking certain routes over others due to the awkwardness of navigation. Suburban cul de sacs are the worst anti-grid in that they supposedly encourage use of the open space but really they just lead to streets no one drives down and a lack of neighborhood interaction.

a grid w/ extremely wide streets and low density - which is more or less the case for most american cities - doesn't necessarily encourage foot traffic, commerce or mixed-use neighborhoods.

what you can say is that a grid is almost objectively better for a public transit system

Oh christ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_plan#Roman_Grid

http://extendny.com/

I'm late to this party but I'll vote for 'medieval' personally even though I'm very fond of my mostly grid but partly 'in between' city. I'm not sure that grids are necessarily modern, though a certain modern progressivism is sometimes implied as much as they are rationalist and even classical. The biggest difference between 'medieval' and 'grid' in the long run stems from the amount of time and effort most ppl are willing (or forced) to invest in overcoming natural obstacles.

depends on how you define obstacles, no? someone walking a mile in manhattan is probably going to have to cross more streets and wait for more traffic lights than someone walking a mile in paris.

Grids are better for running. I enjoyed getting around in Hong Kong, but it was maddening that I couldn't find a relatively straight line from my hotel to Victoria Park. Sidewalks would inexplicably end and there would be good place to cross the street. Or the sidewalk would take me into a random parking garage or building.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7019/6642142077_ac5d7f20e1.jpg

depends on how you define obstacles, no?

I mean rocky hills and meandering creeks and swamps and whatnot. The Romans built on grids quite often but they were disciplined and good at engineering. Rome itself is conspicuously older than that tradition/technical ability. Paris is mostly 'medieval', evolving haphazardly over centuries taken and retaken, built and rebuilt and some of the weird streets in Paris were essentially suburban pathways that got swallowed up by the burgeoning city.

Also, Jeff, tbf, Hong Kong is kind of an outlier even amongst 'medieval' cities.

I'd be totally into some sort of uniform, regular layout other than a rectangular grid though. Triangles, maybe. Or nested circles.

feel like in some ways that's the worst of both worlds, you don't have the organic feel of an old world city but you don't have the efficiency that comes w/ a grid

I'm for the "something in between". Glasgow and Edinburgh both have some form of grid structure in the centre, but the outlying areas have a bit more of the "mediaeval" feel to them.

I like this! I think having either to the exclusion of the other is overkill. Grid systems can get a little monotonous, and complete lack of sensible organisation (cf. Luxembourg!) is frustrating.

Scotland ftw!

A rectangular grid isn't necessarily more efficient than a triangular one or whatever. You can still find your way around easily, still figure out where you are relative to anywhere else. It just takes a bit of getting used to, I'd imagine.

well with something like this

http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/goboard/tri_board.png

it'd be a pain for every single intersection in the city to be 6 lane. maybe more feasible without traffic.

Here's an article on LA skewed grid, I think I read it via la.curbed.com. The original grid was done per Spanish law decreeing a 45 degree orientation to give sunlight to every side of a building. The founders only managed a 36 degree slant, probably because of the river.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/24/opinion/la-oe-waldie-maps-20101024

that's v. interesting

chicago and nyc are ideal imo. love the straight streets with nw/sw aves and blvds mixed in. there's enough angles and architecture and underground streets and trains and subways and waterways to keep it all interesting.

otm, multi-level is a huge additional factor

hills can serve the same 'interesting streetscape' functions as non-griddiness too. see: SF

"problematic" is such a silly word

like a machine that makes problems

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2012/01/how-do-we-find-our-way-around-city/967/

sorta related to earlier discussion

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2012/01/how-do-we-find-our-way-around-city/967/

sorta related to earlier discussion

gah what happened to double-post guard

The neatest aspects of discovering a new city in person comes in those early moments when you still have some disorientation of where things are and how locations are spatially related. Eventually, you start turning some corners and seeing that aha, this place is near to this place, and the city starts to unfold itself.

You have to get to that point if you want to navigate a city properly, but that unknown mysterious part, where this bookstore may as well be the center of the universe since it's impossible to tell where anything else is, that's the part I look forward to the most.

I always find that 'unfolding' experience weird. It's never something I notice happening, it just does. I think, maybe, it's kind of like reading, where once you've learned to read, you can't look at words and not read them. And once I have a mental map of an area it's impossible to be in it and not know where I am relative to everything else. That's the part I look forward to the most! I like the sort of feeling of residency that comes with it.

it's true, cities are at their most magical in the first few days. it's probably the strongest argument for tourism I can think of.

I think I get the most out of a city when I visit the second time. At that point, I have a tentative idea of where some things are and have a small amount of experience to fall back on if I need to, but more importantly to build on. You're not going to feel bad about going to some place you really liked last time if your plan to go to some place new falls through.

I see exploring a new city as clearing the fog of war in a real time strategy game.

My dad moved to a new neighborhood when I was 17, one that I had never been to before. Now, twenty years later, I'll drive down his street for a visit and the sun will hit one of the houses in a certain way that gives me a glimpse of what the place looked like back when it was completely unfamiliar to me, but it never lasts for very long.

There's an opposite effect to this too, with Google Maps. I'll check out some apartment in Brooklyn or Milwaukee that I crashed at in my twenties, a place that I wouldn't be able to find in person today. However, I'll zoom in on Google Maps, see how it all fit and it almost alters my memories of that location in a way.

Of course, there wasn't a Starbucks on the corner back then, so I'm still disoriented.

There was a new Twilight Zone back in the 80s where a couple awoke "outside" of time. All these blue men were building the world around them. The explanation was that the world had to be constructed for each minute of time and they had somehow gotten out of sync. In one scene, the couple looked down an alley that ended in nothingness and the blue man supervisor explained that at that minute that was being constructed, no one bothered to look down the alley, so why build it?

I think about that episode, or the way GTA maps unlock with the more territory you explore, whenever I'm riding around a new highway, trying to collect my bearings.

funny that the example of not griddy is barcelona, since barcelona has a huge griddy area, l'eixample:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eixample_aire.jpg

i like cities like barcelona, or glasgow, where there is some amount of grid but large areas ungridded.

eh that image isn't showing for me, should be something like this

http://thbz.org/images/divers/urbasat/barcelone.jpg

Sacramento grid made me lol when I first moved here, A and 1st street, wow someone just could not be assed with street names.

But it's actually really cool. Even now when I get an address like, 4824 J Street, I know right away "oh down by 48th st".., it's kinda nifty!

I still love the Melbourne CBD grid naming that Trayce mentioned, King, William, Queen, Victoria, it's my fave.

There's an area here where the streets are named in order of the presidents, which is a little annoying since I can't ever remember who comes first, Taylor or Tyler.

(And no, Cleveland Street doesn't circle around Harrison Cove.)

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

In defense of DC I have to say I really love the roundabouts/traffic circles

I like the way Barcelona cut the corners of the blocks in their grid section (called The Expansion, iirc). Done to let more light in at the intersections, I read. Also the way every third block or so had a wider street to allow a strip park between the streets.

And Oxnard, where I did most of my growing up, sometimes names streets alphabetically on some theme. Near me was the tree section (Ash, Birch, Cedar, Date, Elm, etc) and a California city section (Ontario, Piedmont, Rialto, Saratoga, Tehama, Ukiah, Visalia - think they skipped Q).

yeah I always dig the alphabetical word thing...it's a nice compromise

My favorite street name in town comes after the alphabet streets - you go from A to Z and then to AMPERSAND STREET.

Everybody knows [ comes after Z!

There are a bunch of communities in Calgary where the street naming convention takes the first word/letters of the community name. Example: the community I lived in in Calgary was called Silver Springs, so all of the street names started with 'silver': Silver Crest, Silver Brook, Silvergrove, etc. In Dalhousie, you get street names like Dalgetty, Dalrimple, Dalhurst... It's pretty much the stupidest, most confusing naming convention ever. Navigating is difficult because all the street names look the same and all the houses look the same.

salsa shark wears the scars of such early exposure to alliteration to this day

scars of alliteration exposure / questionable urban design

near my parent's house is a road called GOOD INTENTIONS ROAD

I used to mail out bill payments at a job I had, some of which went to a street I think in Texas, which I guess had been renamed at some point following the appearance of a bunch of corporate firms who'd bought up cheap land, to place their processing centres in, & every month or so I'd get to mail in a payment to CASH COLLECTIONS DRIVEWAY or something really similar, kicking myself because I can't remember. which just seemed like the most brutal resignation of any attempt to make a street a street. like almost the opposite of good intentions road.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2012/01/how-do-we-find-our-way-around-city/967/

sorta related to earlier discussion

― iatee, Tuesday, 17 January 2012 20:08 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this study was lead by a Dr Frankenstein, fwiw

growing up in lol adelaide its grid all the way for me

which is tough because sydney was mapped out by drunk convicts iirc

Grids are ok if you also have hills but I think medieval is the most interesting.

Hold on grids are terrible if you also have hills. Because then you regularly end up having to walk uphill then downhill (or downhill then uphill) to get between two points of the same altitude.

I like that. Views!

this thread needs more pictures of 'your city' and its grid or lackthereof btw

Downtown. Nice and orderly.

http://i612.photobucket.com/albums/tt203/pplains/Screenshot2012-01-18at95437AM.png

And where the hills start.

http://i612.photobucket.com/albums/tt203/pplains/Screenshot2012-01-18at95521AM.png

Addresses and streets are divided into EWNS, but unfortunately, the dividing line for these directions are at Broadway and Markham – right at the top of the map near the river.

That means there are hardly any "north" streets (at least in this part of town) and the numeral addresses way out in west Little Rock are five or six digits long.

Grids all the way. Specifically Chicago. Jesse and n/a super OTM.

I have no as in none innate sense of direction. Even when I can see the lake (always east) I have to stop, actually stop walking and stand still so I can concentrate, and think "lake is east, so that way is west (here I turn and stand so west is to my left (spells WE that way, you see)) and north is up and south is down" to get my bearings. So this joy of exploration in a medieval city that some of you talk about is abject terror to me.

That said I love London in part because it's confusing and terrifying and mysterious to me. But if I lived there I would probably have a nervous breakdown or at least always be late for everything bc I would get lost and have to take a taxi to escape my own mental vortex every time I went anywhere.

http://cl.ly/1R471F040A3P2C2N3C0E

My greater neighborhood

Whoops, maybe this works: http://f.cl.ly/items/0s2D0w2K2n2n1w1M2D3d/2012-01-18%20at%2010:34.png

dead people don't give a damn about your grid system.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

genuinely surprised griddier didn't win

There's an area here where the streets are named in order of the presidents, which is a little annoying since I can't ever remember who comes first, Taylor or Tyler.

love this, because i know them

nyc pisses me off because while it has the grid, the street numbers don't make sense -- if something is between sixth and seventh, it should start with a 6, not a whatever west.

moving from mpls and anchorage to dc was tough because the numbered streets run e-w in the former and n-s in the latter. also in dc you can stay on the same road, going straight, and suddenly you are on a different road -- following us route 50 through the district is quite a feat.

i like idiosyncratic things -- eg in pittsburgh fifth and sixth avenues converge -- but it's bogus to build them from scratch like the hill in center field at minutemaid in houston. shit like venice and cordoba is way too idiosyncratic tho.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2012/01/gps-smartphones-and-dumbing-down-personal-navigation/1036/

venice is probably the one city it's not useful to make any comparison to!

not that you were, just saying

Serendipitous journeys are overrated. I bet that author likes cuddling paper books too.

I mean for every serendipitous journey I have had, there would be ten holy shit where am I, I've got to go to the bathroom, I'm going to die of hypothermia while waiting for this bus journeys.

"Gosh this map of Venice is so confusing on this iPhone –" *splash*

lol

some cool barcelona pics:

http://all-that-is-interesting.com/post/11631868693/the-astounding-design-of-eixample-barcelona

that rules

salt lake city's grid is next-level in the sense that it isn't determined by or built around a geographic landmark of any kind and the grid always conforms to absolute directions. also, the streets are insanely wide. it's like living in a slightly deranged thought.

― ah, how quaint (Matt P), Tuesday, January 3, 2012 4:23 PM

you know as well as I that SLC is the slightly deranged thought...OF A PROPHET

When I lived in SLC I developed the helpful directional mnemonic that the wussy mountains are in the west and the excellent mountains are in the east

There are two one-way streets here where all the strip malls and car dealerships crowd the interstate. I can't ever remember if Landers is the one on the left or if Warden is the one in the west.

hate grids

If you don't like grids, move to Boston. Every street seems to wind around crazily; I'm told this is because they follow the path of ancient pre-paved roads.

Washington DC has a good layout IMO - a grid intersected by several diagonal roads, with roundabouts at busy interchanges. The grid streets are sequentialy numbered for north-south roads, lettered for east-west, so you can easily find your address without resorting to a map or GPS.

I enjoy cities where directions are given by cardinal direction, but the grid actually aligns to se/nw or sw/ne.

Fact: It was Thomas Jefferson who pressed for dividing the land in this country like blocks and not the crazy way like in New England and Mid-Atlantic states.

http://www.planetizen.com/node/54477

And a response (from the commenters) I'm with Knight.

http://www.thegreatamericangrid.com/2012/02/26/choose-the-grid-absolutely-2/

yeah defining "land use efficiency" by "useable private land" is v. misleading when 'useable how' matters more than 'how much'

I want to learn more abt city grids! What should I read or watch?

http://www.mcny.org/shop/84/233/10720/the-greatest-grid-the-master-plan-of-manhattan-1811-2011.html