It makes it more legible to people what these things could mean for how we might live. “This kind of thing could help to quickly demonstrate what it looks like to be a walkable place versus a drivable place and maybe start a conversation about that. Of course no existing city is likely to significantly reshape its street grid to create smaller blocks, but Boeing thinks there’s still value in comparing and contrasting old dense cities with newer, more sprawling ones. The following series of photographs depicts the orthogonal grid plan of 17 cities around the world and their variations according to local characteristics. “Just because you have a walkable street network, it doesn’t mean land use supports walkability or a pleasant streetscape.”īoeing sees the tool as primarily being used by planners to add context in communications materials or at design charrettes. “These visualizations don’t tell you about the quality of streetscape itself,” he says. It’s a caveat to the tool Boeing readily admits. It doesn’t show you what it’s like to walk or bike in a given square mile, or the density of buildings. Granted, a black and white grid illustration can only tell you so much about an urban environment. “I think it’s a good communication tool because it shows you how much living space there is in a place like Rome or Tunis or Osaka, all the life and activity and history that can fit into that small square mile, as opposed to a few blocks of a business park in Irvine,” Boeing says. How well-connected or disconnected it is, and what its street circulation patterns are.” “You can quickly get a sense of the texture of a city. “It gives you visual objectivity when comparing across cities,” Boeing explains. student created an open-source tool to make 1-square-mile street grid maps at the same scale, which allows a viewer to easily compare two cities’ street networks. The University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D. Geoff Boeing’s Street Network Visualization project serves a similar function - offering a snapshot of a given city’s street grid density. Jacobs herself included diagrams in the short blocks chapter to help illustrate her argument to readers. But it’s not necessarily an intuitive one. The concept is, of course, deeply familiar to planners and architects and city lovers at this point. The grid has played a foundational role in the spatial organisation of cities, towns, rural communities and the national territory of the United States as a. “Long blocks, in their nature, thwart the potential advantages that cities offer to incubation, experimentation, and many small or special enterprises,” Jane Jacobs wrote in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Short blocks and frequent streets, however, are valuable, she said, because “of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighborhood.”
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