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The Decline of the City Grid

economist.com

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Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#51

Post by cperciva »

freeqaz wrote: post #48

I recently visited Vancouver, BC (Canada) and I was blown away by their urban development planning. They have tons of density, but the city doesn't look dystopian because they've mixed different styles of building well. What this manifests in reality is a less car-dependent city that's extremely walkable (they also have amazing walking paths all over). Overall, I just found the experience to be amazing in comparison…

I'm guessing you were downtown? From roughly 15th south -- the majority of the city -- pretty much all you get is suburban wasteland of detached homes.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#53

Post by marcosdumay »

kkfx wrote: post #18

The decline is in served purposes not a specific design: cities in the very past was needed for various reasons, in the modern age most reasons was economy of scale, witch means: lower prices because your neighbor competitor try to lower it's prices a little bit to compete against you and so you do until the lowest possible denominator in the current state of thing, than companies specialize and split, one window mak…

Well, cities are still growing, and people are still concentrating on fewer and fewer of them... So I'd say that any call for they losing their purpose is way too precipitated.

I do agree we seem to be moving on that direction. But we are surely not there.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#55

Post by bobthepanda »

bombcar wrote: post #36
nkrisc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've inspired me as well to ramble about why grids are great. Growing up in Chicago, I have a deep love of the grid. It made sense, it made navigation easy. It made addresses have real meaning . Take the address of the Vic Theater, for example: 3145 N Sheffield. It tells you just about everything you need to know. It tells you that Sheffield is a North/South street. Because it's an odd number it tells you the build…

Seattle’s grid is similarly informative with additional information just from the numbered street name.

Many of the street names are not numbered though, particularly in the Denny grid area.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#56

Post by quickthrower2 »

bee_rider wrote: post #32

How do you even give directions in Chicago? It seems horribly confusing — go down the straight road, once you’ve passed 15 intersections turn left blah blah. No way to keep track of that kind of junk. Boston is much easier to navigate and get direction, go until you hit the triangular intersection, take the left branch, you’ll eventually find a rotary has brushed up on your road, take that etc etc. Each intersection…

Or without a grid: "Take the 3rd left, then the 2nd right, cross the next roundabout at the 2nd exit which is a slight right, keep going for 3.2 miles and it is there on your right"

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#57

Post by prottog »

nkrisc wrote: post #21
beej71 wrote: post #5

[freewheeling unplanned thinking-out-loud ahead] I like grids... but I'm not sure why. I live at the edge of the old grid section in my town. West of me, it turns into modern non-grid. Which I don't like. But do I not like it because of the lack of grid? Or because of the new modern wall-to-wall cookie-cutter construction? I look at an old organically-grown city and it's fascinating to me; its ties to the distant pas…

You've inspired me as well to ramble about why grids are great. Growing up in Chicago, I have a deep love of the grid. It made sense, it made navigation easy. It made addresses have real meaning . Take the address of the Vic Theater, for example: 3145 N Sheffield. It tells you just about everything you need to know. It tells you that Sheffield is a North/South street. Because it's an odd number it tells you the build…

> Now I live in suburbia elsewhere in the country and street numbers are essentially meaningless, except to differentiate buildings on the same street.

I've even been on some suburban streets where there was no rule to the numbering scheme at all! Houses next door having radically different numbers, even and odd numbers being on both sides of the same street, etc. Drove me nuts.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#58

Post by Kon-Peki »

madcaptenor wrote: post #28
nkrisc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've inspired me as well to ramble about why grids are great. Growing up in Chicago, I have a deep love of the grid. It made sense, it made navigation easy. It made addresses have real meaning . Take the address of the Vic Theater, for example: 3145 N Sheffield. It tells you just about everything you need to know. It tells you that Sheffield is a North/South street. Because it's an odd number it tells you the build…

Salt Lake City encodes latitude and longitude in the street names.

I just looked at a map - it appears that 0 N/S/E/W is the Mormon Temple downtown. It also looks like "newer" streets have names rather than numbers - further from downtown. Is there a date at which they stopped the practice?

One thing the parent commenter missed was that the numbers also have larger distance meanings. 3200 North in Chicago means the road is 4 miles north of Madison St in the Loop (100 is 1/8th of a mile). If the guy was trying to get to the Vic Theatre and accidentally got off the train at Fullerton (2400 N), he'd know that it's only a mile walk - maybe it's faster to just hike it than wait for the next train.

EDIT - Diversey is 2800; Fullerton is 2400. Whoops, I haven't been over there in a long time!

EDIT 2 - The SLC scheme reminds me of the "rural grid" common in some old NW territory states, such as Indiana, where the county roads and addresses are numbered as the distance from the county courthouse. IE a road named 500N would be an east-west road 5 miles north of the courthouse, which was typically as close to the center of the county as possible.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#59

Post by bobthepanda »

akgerber wrote: post #10
beej71 wrote: post #5

[freewheeling unplanned thinking-out-loud ahead] I like grids... but I'm not sure why. I live at the edge of the old grid section in my town. West of me, it turns into modern non-grid. Which I don't like. But do I not like it because of the lack of grid? Or because of the new modern wall-to-wall cookie-cutter construction? I look at an old organically-grown city and it's fascinating to me; its ties to the distant pas…

Many old neighborhoods were originally literal wall-to-wall cookie-cutter construction, with Brooklyn brownstones being a prime example. My Brooklyn block was originally basically 4 different groups of identical buildings, with the new-law tenement I live in being substantially identical to 10 others it was built in a cluster with (except, now, to one that has had two stories added on top). Nevertheless I find the ar…

The origin of the land grid in the US is to facilitate land transactions with standard land plot sizes.

So while Brooklyn started out as wall to wall sameness it’s very easy, and predictable, for one person to sell and that particular plot to become individual again.

This is not generally true in American subdivisions, where locations are much more varied in shape, available infrastructure, etc. and so development has to be much more context dependent. And of course single use zoning was not introduced into NYC until 1961 so that helps the ease of redevelopment as well.

Re: The Decline of the City Grid

#60

Post by josh_carterPDX »

twelvechairs wrote: post #8

The big recent exemplar of street layout for a new place is Houten in the netherlands [0] which is basically focussed on a train station and walkable town square at the centre with a ring road at the edge. Roads are a 'soft grid' for pedestrians and cyclists but stopped up for cars making the car network more of a tree with dead ends rather than a grid. And making road speeds slow at the centre and fast at the edges.…

That's amazing. It reminded me of Livermore, CA. They have a bike trail that follows a creek. Wherever it crosses a road (in most parts) the trail dips under the road. A few times every decade the creek floods making the trail there unusable, but I always appreciated being able to avoid the traffic as a kid.
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