Tag: boston

Urban

Urban Street Network Orientation

Post author By gboeing
Post date 2019-09-09
26 Comments on Urban Street Network Orientation

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). This study explores the spatial signatures of urban evolution and central planning. It examines street network orientation, connectivity, granularity, and entropy in 100 cities around the world using OpenStreetMap data and OSMnx for modeling and visualization:

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. 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. The cities above are in alphabetical order. Here they are again, re-sorted from most-ordered/gridded city (Chicago) to most-disordered (Charlotte):

Tags academia, amsterdam, athens, atlanta, baghdad, baltimore, bangkok, barcelona, beijing, beirut, berlin, bogota, boston, budapest, buenos aires, cairo, cape town, caracas, casablanca, charlotte, chicago, city, cleveland, clustering, complex systems, complexity, connectivity, copenhagen, dallas, damascus, data, data science, dc, denver, design, detroit, dubai, dublin, entropy, geopandas, geospatial, gis, glasgow, hanoi, havana, helsinki, history, hong kong, honolulu, houston, istanbul, jakarta, jerusalem, johannesburg, journal article, kabul, karachi, kathmandu, kiev, kyoto, lagos, land use, las vegas, lima, lisbon, london, los angeles, madrid, manhattan, manila, maps, math, matplotlib, melbourne, mexico city, miami, minneapolis, modeling, mogadishu, montreal, moscow, mumbai, munich, nairobi, networks, new delhi, new orleans, new york, orientation, orlando, osaka, oslo, osmnx, paris, philadelphia, phnom penh, phoenix, pittsburgh, planning, polar histogram, port au prince, portland, prague, pyongyang, python, reykjavik, rio de janeiro, rome, san francisco, sao paulo, sarajevo, science, scikit-learn, seattle, seoul, shanghai, singapore, spatial analysis, spatial networks, st louis, stockholm, street-network, sydney, taipei, tehran, tokyo, toronto, ulaanbaatar, urban, urban design, urban planning, vancouver, venice, vienna, visualization, warsaw, washington

Planning

Comparing US City Street Orientations

Post author By gboeing
Post date 2018-07-10
174 Comments on Comparing US City Street Orientations

This post is adapted from this research paper that you can read/cite for more info. It analyzes and visualizes 100 cities around the world.

“We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1960, one hundred years after Emerson’s quote, Kevin Lynch published The Image of the City, his treatise on the legibility of urban patterns. How coherent is a city’s spatial organization? How do these patterns help or hinder urban navigation? I recently wrote about visualizing street orientations with Python and OSMnx. That is, how is a city’s street network oriented in terms of the streets’ compass bearings? How well does it adhere to a straightforward north-south-east-west layout? I wanted to revisit this by comparing 25 major US cities’ orientations (EDIT: by popular request, see also this follow-up comparing world cities):

Academia

New Position at Northeastern

Post author By gboeing
Post date 2018-05-31
3 Comments on New Position at Northeastern

I’m happy to announce that I have accepted a tenure-track offer from Northeastern University as an assistant professor of urban informatics in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, with a faculty affiliation in Northeastern’s Network Science Institute. I will be starting in the Fall and moving to Boston later this summer!

Tags academia, boston, networks, urban informatics, urban planning

Planning

Square-Mile Street Network Visualization

Post author By gboeing
Post date 2017-01-02
46 Comments on Square-Mile Street Network Visualization

Check out the journal article about OSMnx. All figures in this article come from this journal article, which you can read/cite for more.

The heart of Allan Jacobs’ classic book on street-level urban form and design, Great Streets, features dozens of hand-drawn figure-ground diagrams in the style of Nolli maps. Each depicts one square mile of a city’s street network. Drawing these cities at the same scale provides a revealing spatial objectivity in visually comparing their street networks and urban forms.

We can recreate these visualizations automatically with Python and the OSMnx package, which I developed as part of my dissertation. With OSMnx we can download a street network from OpenStreetMap for anywhere in the world in just one line of code. Here are the square-mile diagrams of Portland, San Francisco, Irvine, and Rome created and plotted automatically by OSMnx:

Tags boston, city, complex systems, complexity, data, data science, design, dubai, europe, geopandas, geopy, geospatial, gis, irvine, land use, livability, maps, matplotlib, modeling, neighborhood, networks, numpy, osaka, osmnx, pandas, portland, projection, python, rome, sacramento, san francisco, shapely, street-network, tutorial, urban, urban design, urban form, urban planning, visualization