Grids make a city real?

[zurrabear 20]

Originally posted by: Legosim

I like to build my cities like a spider web, confusing but effecentquote>

I'd like to see some pics of your cities--that design sounds intriguing, if difficult to work with because of diagonals.

San Francisco is a good example of a young American city with an off-beat design.  A lot of the newer parts are gridded, but the hills of course make gridding much more difficult; but much of the downtown area is a diagonal grid...very difficult to reproduce accurately in SC4.

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[MTA3479 0]

A grid is perfect for a large city, traffis-wise. (And if you're making NYC)

[iGod 6]

Originally posted by: Kusajika Yachiru

Originally posted by: iGod

Over here in Europe you will hardly find any grid whatsoever. Not even in the largest cities like London, Berlin or Paris. The cities just grew without anyone planning them out properly. But then, you're also right, there are a lot of problems involved with this. Like the way to narrow streets or simply the confusion in finding a certain street. It's like with the names of the streets, if for example, I drive around in New York City on the 5th Ave. I know that I will eventually cross the 31st Street. And that also pretty much just works with grids (Ok, I don't know if thats right but you get my point).

But if you try to find Goswell Rd. whilst you're in Cheshire Rd. in London you gonna have a hard time.

But also, for me, grids just look quite unnaturally. Of corse I use them in my city planning but mostly in the centre or in the suburbs. Yes, if you go around in the suburbs which have been build in the 60s and 70s, they are build in a grid-style as well.quote>

So what is sounds like and this also goes for others post is that the only real reason most cities over seas don't have a grid look or even cities in America (way old ones like Boston) is because they were planed for walking and horse drawn I mean though this is kinda guessing and stuff but I think if somehow they knew about our cars and other forms of transit of todays age they would have planned way different maybe not even a grid but I really do think the windy roads though as nice as they look only came out that way because no one could for see a gas powered hupin-hymer hehe... car btw

And a grid to me would be almost flawless if they could get those darn traffic lights in sync like simcity does lol how absurd to play a game of real life "Red-Light Green-Light"quote>

Well, about the long and windy roads (  don't you love the Beatles) outside the city, they are due to land ownership of the farmers. The field are not square they are just...somehow...well, whatever land people occupied in the past. So the roads mostly go between the border of two fields or so and that's why they seem to be sensless winded. Or past forests it's the same, they can't just build throught the forest so they were building around them. Dunno if that made sense to you but PM me and I'll explain better lol.

iGod

[sumwonyuno 42]

With various previous posters, I agree that grid layout history do not share their roots with the automobile.

From my hometown, development started near the harbor, and streets were laid out in rough blocks. Because of mountains, hills and the shoreline, land for roadways and development is limited. When the city first expanded, new streets were straighter and had streetcars. Private landowners that bought huge areas subdivided their land into smaller lots. The grids from some of these subdivisions were not related to optimal traffic or even geography. When the streetcars were gone, city layout reflected automobile use. Virtually all new urbanized land since 1945 is suburban sprawl.

[stonewolf99 0]

Gridding a city vs not is an older debate than many people realize. in 2600 BCE, in the Indus valley in what is now pakistan, the mud-brick and stone city of Mohenjo-daro was laid out with a grid pattern, and even included plumbing!

The Greeks and Romans refined the philosophy of gridded cities, but stressed the importance of a haphazard layout as being more defensible as invaders have a harder time fighting their way in.

Many European cities have streets that follow either the routes to water (for livestock, trade, transportation), defensive planning (especially in older sections of once-fortified cities/towns), or smaller towns and villages that were absorbed into the larger urban area as the population grew and development spread. The Romans standardized their new cities mainly along the Hippodamian Model which emphasized a grid layout and specific placement of buildings and "zones" (as SC4 calls them).

Conversely, the city of Rome itself is an amalgam of several villages that merged together before anyone considered a large scale urban plan. London is another example of this and also has several streets following the paths of rivers that have been covered over and forced into tunnels . Paris also was, until Napoleon razed large sections of the city to eliminate the narrow, congested, medieval streets and alleys that were easy for the citizens to barricade. The broad avenues of Paris allowed the various regiments stationed in the city to have direct line of sight with each other.

Modern urban planning typically follows a more aesthetic approach, which, when combined with a trend of suburban sprawl (at least in America) leads to a proliferation of residential areas with winding, curvy roads and cul-du-sacs.

The SC4 game design and limitations make grid planning an efficient choice. Since you're not trying to fend off ravening hordes in the game, how you lay out your city ultimately comes down to individual taste.

[cemaphon 0]

Originally posted by: Cobhris96

Grids and automobiles are unrelated. America was using grids regularly by the early 19th century. Cars didn't become mainstream until the 1920's.quote>

Yep - Much of it has to do with the fact that most of the land in the US west of the Appalachians was granted or sold in the form of square lots, largely because most of it wasn't even surveyed at the time of sale. So the roads tended to follow the boundaries.

Also, people just preferred that system. Early in the history of the city of Tacoma, WA, an East Coast architect was hired to make a town plat. He came up with a surprisingly ahead-of-his-time design - circular roads, terrain contouring. The city fathers laughed him out of town and drew up a gridded plat instead.

[SC4BOY 21]

Has a lot to do with both history and terrain.. older cities tended to be along rivers in not-so-flat areas.. so the streets wound around the river and tended to be very random.. Plus they didn't have the heavy construction equipment to modify terrain, so the streets tended to follow the lay of the land... . throughout most of the mid-west USA the land is relatively flat and orthogonal rules the day.. large expanses of flat area.. the city I grew up in not only was almost totally orthogonal.. with the exception of an area following the "canyon" that passed through .. but the streets were Avenue A, B, C etc with the cross streets being 1st street, 2nd street, 3rd, etc.. After it got to Ave Z, they started with trees.. LOL.. Ash Ave, Birch Ave, etc..

[thegameguy 4]

can i (yes a ***** ) say that yes most of europe is unplaned, but one of the reasons the us citys are well planed on grids is that america isn't that old, places like london on the other hand was a roman port city

[TekindusT 3,809]

I agree with some ideas above. Cities are usually planned following the trends their geography imposes. It's obvious that a city built in a completely flat terrain, will tend to have a grid; as the core of Roman cities did. If you pay attention, you'll notice that the core of Roman cities were built in flatlands (Pompeii comes to my mind), allowing a grid. On the other hand, when cities have to overcome hills, rivers, etc., begins the funny part. Some major streets are laid over rivers or streams, or others have to go round a mountain; both making curves and crashing grids.

[holbrookmiles1 0]

When designing my cities I tend to use a grid pattern as the main foundation, but as my city grows and displays the need for more central commercial and industrial nodes, I will use a radial street system that connects those nodes, no matter if it cuts straight through the grid. I think this tends to give a realistic look to the grid pattern.

[Shlarin 0]

China has many "old" cities with a grid-like city center (i.e. Beijing.) Then again, it's probably the most efficient method of achieving high population density.

[Heblem 600]

In Mexico almost all main cities has grid, specially at Downtown areas which are 300 years old... almost entire city is gridded...

Also in current in some areas gridding stills developing... for example look at this mexico city suburb...

[RedImperator 16]

Recently I started a new city with a mind to make it less relentlessly gridded than my previous attempts. Unfortunately, there's a limited selection of even diagonal buildings, never mind fractional-angle roads or curves, and since there's only so many diagonal "parkways" you can build and I hate the look of staggered buildings, I was stuck with an orthogonal road layout.

The solution? Let the game draw the roads for you. What you end up with is a mishmash of grids that don't quite meet up, odd-sized blocks at transition points, two roads running parallel which don't connect to each other, and lots of other weirdness. I also laid out a bunch of farms in more or less random sizes and shapes, and then as I expanded the city over them, I preserved the old property boundaries, creating more roads that break the grid. On top of all of this, I laid a grid of 12x4 blocks. The result looks surprisingly good and presents some interesting transportation challenges (such as a city of 45,000 which has only one north-south arterial road that runs the entire length of the city, and no contiguous east-west route).

[soldyne 111]

that second pic is very telling. you can see that the avenue in the center was made after the main grid was formed since it is not parallel to the overall grid. I bet it took a lot money and time to demolish all the buildings that were in the way to make room for it.

[tiks 0]

A city with grids would be like this?

And one without grids like this?:

[SC4BOY 21]

Older USA cities also develop odd grids because as they spread out.. and most do.. they run into adjacent "towns and villages" which were already there.. don't forget that only 100 years ago towns and villages dotted the land every 4 or 5 miles or even less... and many cities became one when they started as two towns across the river from each other.. but later found it more effective to operate as one, etc

[metarvo 711]

I tend to see grids most of the time, although most of the cities in my area have two grids that intersect each other at one point, one being the older part of town and one being newer.  One of the city's two grids is often fractional angled, while the other one tends to be either orthogonal or diagonal.  Usually, there's one or two roads that go against the grid, and they are often the major roads in that city.  Just my §0.02.

[Kusajika Yachiru 9]

That second picture of that Mexican suburb looks so, vast... as if it goes on forever. And I noticed that that avenue in the middle does look like it cut through and it did it at a slant at that (maybe building reasons?) how odd but for them to make such a huge area of suburb girdded like that is crazy, I've never seen anything like it. It most work if they still use it... or maybe it's just the best way to cram a lot of people in one spot?

[Shilka 0]

I like how in the Netherlands you can still see the remainders of medieval defensive moats in a lot of city centres of older cities. Sometimes the road patterns still conform to those defensive moats, canals and other waterways. With waterways being an important means of transportation and defense in past times a lot of villages and cities were shaped alongside the water.

This is the town of Bourtange, which has been fully restored to it's old glory, perfectly showing the defensive moats. The town itself has a nice radial, spiderweb like road pattern.

The city centre of Groningen, still showing remainders of the moats.

Same goes for the city centre of Leeuwarden.

The city of Leiden still has almost all of the original defensive moat surrounding its city centre.

[smileymk 4]

Grid or no grid? Well, I have a solution...

In Milton Keynes, England, where I live, there is a network of main roads called the 'grid system' in an American style. These roads, either single or dual carriageway, form rough squares / rectangles about 1x1 km in size (they are NOT straight, but do follow a rough direction.) These roads carry the UK national speed limit (60 or 70 mph), making the place good for fast cross-city travel. 

At every intersection between these roads there is a roundabout, and these contain traffic lights at some important junctions (but not all of them). 

As for what is inside these squares, well, like most EU cities, this is a totally random street pattern which is (usually) confined to within its own square. There will typically be 1 or 2 connections to the grid system on each side. 

(However, the town centre follows an even stricter pattern of griddiness than the grid roads themselves.)

So, basically, there are towns, like Milton Keynes, that can successfully mix gird and random patterns.

This could be a solution to your griddiness "problem".

smileymk

[LivingInThePast 364]

Houston is basically a grid pattern with roads being in a roughly latitudinal/longitudinal pattern...but the system disintegrates as you get past the inner beltway loop.

[naftixe 131]

Most American Cities that lie west of the Ohio river, and west of the Mississippi River follow a strict grid system due to the Northwest Ordinance Act at the close of the 18th Century, when these federal territories was in the process of becoming states.

This grid system used a baseline of North/South, and East West. From this baseline 1 square mile area were quartered and then sub-quartered to a point of 40 acre plots. Major roads or Pikes were placed on the baselines, and then more minor roads were placed into the grid. An old term, the back 40, comes from the roadway system in which a parcel of land of 40 acres was behind another parcel therefore blocking direct road connections. Some major roads still carry the name Baseline.

This system was pretty predominate in the US until the 1950's with the suburb explosion, in which the WW2 veteran and newly made middle class population, moved from the city to these subdivided areas that became to be known as subdivisions. Levittown was the first one. The grid pattern quickly went to curves, dead-end, cul-de-sacs, circles, moons, etc. this was to slow traffic down in these residential only zones. The US interstate and Federal Highway system allowed for suburbs to sprawl many miles from the city center and thusly from 1950's-1980's created to American car culture of 20-40 mile commutes. Now some areas are redeveloping their internal cities to bring back a mix of residential, commerce, and industry. Detroit for example, the actual part within the city limits is 70% unoccupied/abandoned. This is due to the explosion of the suburbs from 1950's-1980's. Industry quickly became the almost only thing within the city limits, beside the federal housing projects. Now Detroit is trying to rebuild their rotten core. This was just a little history of the US grid system and city history. Enjoy.

More information visit here Public Land Survey System (USA)  and Land Ordinance of 1785 and Northwest Ordinance and Levittown, New York

[TekindusT 3,809]

Barcelona's Eixample is one of the typical examples when talking about gridded cities in Europe.

Although the actual result differs from city planner Ildefons Cerdà first intentions, it made the city grow in a tidier and healthier way.