Urban planning and spatial analysis professor at USC

Tag: orientation

Off the Grid… and Back Again?

Post author By gboeing
Post date 2020-11-01
7 Comments on Off the Grid… and Back Again?

My article “Off the Grid… and Back Again? The Recent Evolution of American Street Network Planning and Design” has been published by the Journal of the American Planning Association and won the 2020 Stough-Johansson Springer Award for best paper. It identifies recent nationwide trends in American street network design, measuring how urban planners abandoned the grid and embraced sprawl over the 20th century, but since 2000 these trends have rebounded, shifting back toward historical design patterns. In this post I discuss these findings and visualizations across the US today as well as over time, then discuss my analysis methods.

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):

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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):