IX Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2017

Not all cities are built the same. The point is, street alignment can say a lot about the character of a given city. Some city’s layouts look like a chaos, while other cities like Paris, London, and Barcelona look clear and majestic. At least some of them have to do with the geometry of the grid.

The grid plan dates from antique times and some of the earliest planned cities were built using it. This is an interesting, but ambiguous concept of urban planning. The subject of it is really relevant, because nowadays grid planning is widely used everywhere and here you can find some of its pros and cons.

An important advantage of street grids and the use of straight blocks is that traffic flows of either pedestrians, cars, or both, only cross at right angles. This is an important traffic safety feature, since no one entering the intersection needs to look over their shoulder to see oncoming traffic. The geometry also helps with orientation and way finding.

However, this way of planning has some disadvantages. For instance, the infrastructure cost for regular grid patterns is generally higher than for patterns with discontinuous streets. Frequency of intersections becomes a disadvantage for pedestrians and bicycles. It disrupts the relaxed pace of walking. People with physical limitation, children and seniors for example, can find such walk challenging. Inflexibility of the grid leads to disregarding environmentally sensitive areas such as small streams and creeks in preference for the application of geometry. By contrast, recent discontinuous street patterns follow the configuration of natural features without disrupting them.

Despite its disadvantages, grid patterns are widely used in urban planning, especially in the United States. The first and the most well known example is New York City ’s Manhattan Island. Manhattan is where most of the major landmarks, historical districts and shopping areas are in New York City. It is a long thin island joined to other of the boroughs by bridges, train tunnels and ferries. Manhattan’s numbered roads are all called either East or West STREETS. The division between East and West is along Fifth avenue. The roads running North and South are all called AVENUES. Because Manhattan is 14 miles long, the AVENUES are all, relatively speaking, very long. New Yorkers usually navigate by referring to an address on either a STREET or an AVENUE. This allows you to locate the address very accurately. The special case is the road called Broadway. It follows a historical route and crosses the whole island.

Consider the Chicago grid a functional re-imagining of New York, with square blocks that make it hard to get lost. In a city plagued by dysfunction and corruption this is one thing that works. The straight streets comprise much of the Chicago grid, but diagonal shortcuts serve as major streets in many parts of the city. The land's flat orientation makes an easy journey from one end of the city to another.

An example of grid planning is a city called Barcelona, which is known for its iconic street grid, characterized by wide roads and square blocks. The blocks include wide open spaces, which allow sunlight and ventilation to perimeter buildings. Wide streets are a godsend for traffic flow along with the shaved-off corners, which make turning a seamless process for the many vehicles that cross the neighborhood daily. Like Manhattan’s Broadway, Barcelona has a main street, which is called Diagonale. It passes through a large number of quarters.

Like all urban planning concepts, grid-patterned towns have some pros and cons. However, for many centuries this theory is still alive and that proves its universality and efficiency. It has a lot of successful examples and huge potential to develop. All in all, the concept of urban development is worth to think over.

The List of Literature:

1. Stanislawski, Dan (1946). "The Grid-Pattern Town", Geog. Rev., xxxvi, pp. 105-120, p. 116.

2. Higgins, Hannah (2009), The Grid Book, p. 60.

3. http://www.nlc.org/build-skills-and-networks/resources/cities-101/city-factoids/most-common-us-street-names

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