![]() What Boston lacks in legible circulation patterns, it makes up for in other Lynchian elements (paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks) that help make it an “imageable” city for locals and visitors. If you’re going north and then take a right turn, you might know that you are immediately heading east, but it’s hard to know where you’re eventually really heading in the long run. Although it features a grid in some neighborhoods like the Back Bay and South Boston, these grids tend to not be aligned with one another, resulting in a mish-mash of competing orientations. Unlike most American cities that have one or two primary street grids organizing city circulation, Boston’s streets are more evenly distributed in every direction. To illustrate this more clearly, in Manhattan for example, we can easily see the angled, primarily orthogonal street grid in its polar histogram: Above, we can see that Chicago is the most grid-like city here and Charlotte is the least. Some cities, like Seattle, Denver, and Minneapolis, have an offset downtown with a relatively small number of streets, but the rest of the city’s much larger volume of streets swamps the histogram’s relative frequencies. Note that these are cities proper (municipalities), not wider metro areas or urban agglomerations. Here they are again, re-sorted from most-ordered/gridded city (Chicago) to most-disordered (Charlotte): The cities above are in alphabetical order. Each bar’s direction represents the compass bearings of the streets (in that histogram bin) and its length represents the relative frequency of streets with those bearings. ![]() So, who’s got a grid and who doesn’t? Each of the cities above is represented by a polar histogram (aka rose diagram) depicting how its streets orient. It examines street network orientation, connectivity, granularity, and entropy in 100 cities around the world using OpenStreetMap data and OSMnx for modeling and visualization: This study explores the spatial signatures of urban evolution and central planning. Populate the pages with dreams and doodles.My new article, Urban Spatial Order: Street Network Orientation, Configuration, and Entropy, has just been published in one of my favorite journals: Applied Network Science (download free PDF). We should not let the grid control our creativity…doodle in parts of a city unconsciously, map your travel in a city or just deposit your thoughts in your most favourite spots, parks and squares. The designer Heinz Boesch says, “ The modern city is controlled by the grid. There are 127 city grids from all around the world on 256 pages and each spread is a named different city. ![]() Each page is like the lure of a city just waiting to be discovered and makes note writing fun. ![]() With light blue lines on white pages, Walking-Chair Design Studio of Austria and John Briscella of Aminimal Studio have turned cities into vector graphics and used them as a ‘grid’ for the notebook. Great for architects, designers, urbanistas and artists to map lovers, explorers and travellers… everyone who enjoys urban areas, cities and pretty cool notebooks too. It’s the Urban Gridded Notebook by Walking-Chair Design Studios a blank notebook lined with the street grids of 127 different cities from all over the world, which act as the backdrop to your notes, lists and scribbles. ![]() Something for all of you map geeks out there. ![]()
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