Urban planning and spatial analysis professor at USC

Tag: hong kong

Urban

Urban Street Network Orientation

Post author By gboeing
Post date 2019-09-09
27 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

City Street Orientations around the World

Post author By gboeing
Post date 2018-07-11
92 Comments on City Street Orientations around the World

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.

By popular request, this is a quick follow-up to this post comparing the orientation of streets in 25 US cities using Python and OSMnx. Here are 25 more cities around the world:

Tags bangkok, barcelona, beijing, berlin, budapest, cairo, city, complexity, data, data science, delhi, design, dubai, geocoding, geopandas, geospatial, gis, glasgow, hong kong, lagos, land use, livability, london, madrid, maps, matplotlib, melbourne, mexico city, modeling, moscow, mumbai, munich, neighborhood, networks, osmnx, paris, planning, python, rio de janeiro, rome, science, seoul, street-network, streets, sydney, tehran, tokyo, toronto, urban, urban design, urban planning, venice, visualization, warsaw

Travel

Hong Kong at Night

Hong Kong is a remarkable place. It is the 4th-densest sovereign state or self-governing territory in the world (in 1st place is its neighbor across the delta: Macau). Yet this density is fantastically constrained by the mountains and the sea into narrow, snaking corridors of high-rises wherever the terrain permits. At no time is this unique urban development better seen than at night, when Hong Kong lights up like a carnival.

I took these photos from the top of Victoria Peak on Hong Kong island and from the Tsim Sha Tsui promenade on the Kowloon peninsula, using long exposures of between 3 and 12 seconds.

Tags architecture, asia, china, city, design, hong kong, neighborhood, night, skyline, skyscrapers, travel, urban, urban design