7 ms·

[freewheeling unplanned thinking-out-loud ahead] I like grids... but I'm not sure why. I live at the edge of the old grid section in my town. West of me, it tu

by beej71 4y ago

[freewheeling unplanned thinking-out-loud ahead] I like grids... but I'm not sure why. I live at the edge of the old grid section in my town. West of me, it turns into modern non-grid. Which I don't like. But do I not like it because of the lack of grid? Or because of the new modern wall-to-wall cookie-cutter construction? I look at an old organically-grown city and it's fascinating to me; its ties to the distant past are palpable. So maybe it is that I just don't like modern US housing overall... but also, the organic city grew that way _unplanned_. And we never do anything unplanned any longer. The "planned organic" look has a fake feel to it, right?

zdragnar 4y ago
Old, organic non-grids in my area aren't due to anything other than topography and road construction technology available at the time the area was settled. There are grids too, with a very wide variety of architecture (the city was settled by people from all over europe and the near-east). In both cases, the architecture varies, so it's a nice point of comparison for non-cookie-cutter construction issues. Non-grids tend to have fewer straight lines of sight, so they are more pleasing to live in; trees create an even greater sense of privacy, and people drive a bit slower. They tend to be more pleasing to live in, at least in that regard. On the other hand, they're miserable for commuting if they're big enough. So many slow turns and stops makes it harder to get to a main thoroughfare. If you don't have a good sense of direction or memory, living back in one feels further away than you actually are, which makes the commute feel longer than it actually is. Short trips to the grocery store feel longer if you don't have one inside your non-grid neighborhood.
- devilbunny 4y ago
  There's an interesting hybrid system in New Orleans proper. The city follows the curve of the river, with original land grants being in the French classic frontage-and-depth layout (each grant received a certain minimum amount of river frontage, for shipping out products, and then extended back as far as was possible given the terrain). Within each original grant, there is a grid, and between them there are major boulevards to permit higher-speed, higher-volume traffic from one part of the city to another. But within each grid section, you're entirely on narrow, mostly residential streets - with a few commercial stretches scattered around, and far more neighborhood bars and restaurants in mostly-residential areas than is common in most of the US. Aside from the weather (it's almost always hot and humid), a very bikeable city. And if you're in a car, it usually only takes a few blocks of travel to get to a major road (e.g., the largely-pedestrian French Quarter bounded by Canal, Rampart, and Esplanade).
akgerber 4y ago
Many old neighborhoods were originally literal wall-to-wall cookie-cutter construction, with Brooklyn brownstones being a prime example. My Brooklyn block was originally basically 4 different groups of identical buildings, with the new-law tenement I live in being substantially identical to 10 others it was built in a cluster with (except, now, to one that has had two stories added on top). Nevertheless I find the area pleasing — partially due to wide sidewalks shaded by mature trees, partially the ways the buildings have changed over time ("How Buildings Learn" is a classic book) and a few vacant lots have been infilled with different buildings, partially due to the wear & texture that come with age, and significantly due to the uninterrupted-except-by-parks walkable street grid for miles in every direction. Plenty of 1950s suburbs have gotten pretty aesthetically interesting with the texture of age and mature trees grown in at this point, but very few of them are particularly walkable for daily needs. Very few American cities were unplanned, and many historic gridded neighborhoods sprung up at a shocking pace (many American cities grew at 50% or more a decade for decades on end eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Chicago#Population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Chicago#Popula...) with a ton of cookie-cutter repetition. The city often engaged in extensive redrawing of farm field property lines and regrades before a street was opened. But such cities were designed primarily for pedestrians at a pedestrian scale, rather than modern 'master-planned communities' that are at best islands of walkability in a sea of car-oriented roadways designed to be incredibly unpalatable to traverse by any other means. Much of this is due to modern American zoning, which is among the strictest in the world in terms of separating different uses from each other — "residential" zoning in other countries almost never differentiates single-family housing from other housing, and usually permits quiet auxiliary uses like corner stores, doctor's offices, childcares, etc. (Interestingly, such zoning is known as "Euclidean Zoning" not for any geometric reason but with the town of Euclid, Ohio as its namesake, the plaintiff in a Supreme Court Case establishing such zoning as a legitimate use of the police power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_of_Euclid_v._Ambler_Realty_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_of_Euclid_v._Ambler_Re....)
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  The origin of the land grid in the US is to facilitate land transactions with standard land plot sizes. So while Brooklyn started out as wall to wall sameness it’s very easy, and predictable, for one person to sell and that particular plot to become individual again. This is not generally true in American subdivisions, where locations are much more varied in shape, available infrastructure, etc. and so development has to be much more context dependent. And of course single use zoning was not introduced into NYC until 1961 so that helps the ease of redevelopment as well.
SkeuomorphicBee 4y ago
Exactly, grids are not perfect, but they are much much better than modern non-grid. Modern non-grid is not made for people, it is made for cars, and is incompatible with walking. More specifically, it is the result of optimizing for the wrong thing, it optimizes for getting cars from their houses to the highway and back, sacrificing all local connection and mobility in the process.
- ThunderSizzle 4y ago
  While the modern non-grid is "made for cars", most examples I've seen is also really inefficient at working for cars, in that most non-grid areas I've seen also suck at moving traffic. Inefficient intersections, poorly designed directional conflicts, etc. all exist heavily in a non-grid area, and the response is typically larger, even more inefficient intersections and more poorly designed directional conflicts. Sometimes the lack of space that a grid typically causes actually brings better traffic engineering. But it's definitely correct that the modern non-grid is definitely not suitable to walking/biking, but that's more due to zoning and centralization of systems (e.g. schools) rather than grid vs. non-grid. It's not like a cul-de-sac for a car couldn't contain an off-shoot to a pedestrian/biking path that cuts a trip significantly for a non-car.
  - closeparen 4y ago
    It sits in a kind of weird contradiction, because although one of its characteristics is that it's really only practical to navigate by car (and thus generates traffic!), one of its key design goals is to minimize the car traffic near people's houses. Postwar suburbs have more car traffic in total, but it's okay because it's not in front of your house. But once you go outside of the residential subdivisions, to the places where the traffic has been exiled, they're nightmares. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqQw05Mr63E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqQw05Mr63E
- davidw 4y ago
  Grids are not perfect, but they are "pretty good" in a lot of different circumstances, and far more adaptable than other street patterns. Living on a cul-de-sac is nice in some ways, but it doesn't do well at all with change or adaptation. Grids were "pretty good" with horses and buggies, pretty good with cars, pretty good with eBikes, and will probably be pretty good with whatever the future holds, rather than being "perfect" for any one way of getting around.
nkrisc 4y ago
You've inspired me as well to ramble about why grids are great. Growing up in Chicago, I have a deep love of the grid. It made sense, it made navigation easy. It made addresses have real meaning. Take the address of the Vic Theater, for example: 3145 N Sheffield. It tells you just about everything you need to know. It tells you that Sheffield is a North/South street. Because it's an odd number it tells you the building is on the East side of the street. The "31" tells you it's on the thirty-one hundred block of Sheffield, which once you learn the streets, tells you it's on the block immediately south of Belmont (3200 North). The "45" tells you it's likely at the very North end of the block, because the typical Chicago block only goes up to about XX60 in addresses. The one thing lacking is the latitude for East/West streets and the longitude for North/South street being encoded in the street name, but you could encode an address as an X,Y pair. The above example address could be: 1000 W, 3145 N. Now I live in suburbia elsewhere in the country and street numbers are essentially meaningless, except to differentiate buildings on the same street. Which I suppose is their most basic purpose, but I'm used to addresses being useful for city-wide navigation, so it always felt a bit lacking to me. And don't get me started on my love for and the current lack of alleys where I live now. Chicago alleys are the unsung hero of the city's layout. Just in time edit: It was pointed that I forgot one of the most important things: the numbering system encodes distance as well. Every 100 on the grid, or one full block, is 1/8 of a mile.
- turtlesdown11 4y ago
  Grids are great. But just think of systems like Venice, where you get a building number + district for an address. No street names tied to the buildings at all. Just a number and the sestiere (there are six).
  - nkrisc 4y ago
    That sounds... difficult. I lived in Costa Rica for a brief while and outside of San Jose or town centers most addresses were something like "100 meters east of the statue of the Virgin Mary on calle uno" so at least there were some directions attached. Assuming you knew where the statue of the Virgin Mary was in whatever town, and which way North was.
rhn_mk1 4y ago
Can you provide an example of a "modern non-grid"?
davidw 4y ago
This might look familiar to you, beej: https://bendyimby.com/2018/03/03/street-grids/ https://bendyimby.com/2018/03/03/street-grids/ - goes into some of why grids are good. 'Cookie cutter' construction has a bad reputation, BTW, but cookie cutters are how you get lots of cheap cookies, which a lot of places need right now. The problem is where you don't allow those areas to adapt and change over time, by, say, turning one lot into a corner store or a small cafe or people to adapt their houses over time so they take on their own unique character.
lifefeed 4y ago
Tucked away in the middle of any urban planning article is a reference to Jane Jacob's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". It's a great book that puts into words why certain neighborhoods cities feel alive and fit for humans. From mixed-use buildings to small blocks to sidewalks to parks to landmarks. I'm not going to say her insights are universal for everyone, but it might help you understand why you like that grid you like.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >I'm not going to say her insights are universal for everyone, but it might help you understand why you like that grid you like. Jacobs is really interesting. My one caveat is that I think a lot of people who applaud her helping to block Moses' highway plans for Washington Square Park would probably be less enthusiastic about her support for what was effectively community self-determination. I suspect many would call it NIMBYism because I'm pretty sure making the West Village more affordable wasn't her top priority. (That said, it was a very different environment in NYC in the 1950s than it became in the 70s/80s than it is today.)
  - closeparen 4y ago
    Jacobs combines praise for a very particular type of urban fabric (and a detailed, insightful explication of why it's good) with ideas about preservation and local self-determination, which in her time functioned as a bulwark against modern car-centric design. Now you see NIMBYs who are attached to the "modern" suburban planning regime she helped to fight off, using the same rhetoric to prevent the formation of the same kind of neighborhood she was defending, now that it's back in style.
  - ismokedoinks 4y ago
    In Death and Life she talks about "diversity", which was more about housing types and prices rather than like demographic diversity, but often accomplished the same thing. Definitely a way of making things more affordable.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  Jane should come here to Tokyo to see what a city that's largely fit for humans is like in modern times. Zoning rules here are basically the opposite of America's, and walkability is the norm in most parts of the city (with excellent public transit connecting the most popular districts).

by beej71 4y ago

zdragnar 4y ago

Old, organic non-grids in my area aren't due to anything other than topography and road construction technology available at the time the area was settled. There are grids too, with a very wide variety of architecture (the city was settled by people from all over europe and the near-east). In both cases, the architecture varies, so it's a nice point of comparison for non-cookie-cutter construction issues. Non-grids tend to have fewer straight lines of sight, so they are more pleasing to live in; trees create an even greater sense of privacy, and people drive a bit slower. They tend to be more pleasing to live in, at least in that regard. On the other hand, they're miserable for commuting if they're big enough. So many slow turns and stops makes it harder to get to a main thoroughfare. If you don't have a good sense of direction or memory, living back in one feels further away than you actually are, which makes the commute feel longer than it actually is. Short trips to the grocery store feel longer if you don't have one inside your non-grid neighborhood.

devilbunny 4y ago
There's an interesting hybrid system in New Orleans proper. The city follows the curve of the river, with original land grants being in the French classic frontage-and-depth layout (each grant received a certain minimum amount of river frontage, for shipping out products, and then extended back as far as was possible given the terrain). Within each original grant, there is a grid, and between them there are major boulevards to permit higher-speed, higher-volume traffic from one part of the city to another. But within each grid section, you're entirely on narrow, mostly residential streets - with a few commercial stretches scattered around, and far more neighborhood bars and restaurants in mostly-residential areas than is common in most of the US. Aside from the weather (it's almost always hot and humid), a very bikeable city. And if you're in a car, it usually only takes a few blocks of travel to get to a major road (e.g., the largely-pedestrian French Quarter bounded by Canal, Rampart, and Esplanade).

akgerber 4y ago

Many old neighborhoods were originally literal wall-to-wall cookie-cutter construction, with Brooklyn brownstones being a prime example. My Brooklyn block was originally basically 4 different groups of identical buildings, with the new-law tenement I live in being substantially identical to 10 others it was built in a cluster with (except, now, to one that has had two stories added on top). Nevertheless I find the area pleasing — partially due to wide sidewalks shaded by mature trees, partially the ways the buildings have changed over time ("How Buildings Learn" is a classic book) and a few vacant lots have been infilled with different buildings, partially due to the wear & texture that come with age, and significantly due to the uninterrupted-except-by-parks walkable street grid for miles in every direction. Plenty of 1950s suburbs have gotten pretty aesthetically interesting with the texture of age and mature trees grown in at this point, but very few of them are particularly walkable for daily needs. Very few American cities were unplanned, and many historic gridded neighborhoods sprung up at a shocking pace (many American cities grew at 50% or more a decade for decades on end eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Chicago#Population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Chicago#Popula...) with a ton of cookie-cutter repetition. The city often engaged in extensive redrawing of farm field property lines and regrades before a street was opened. But such cities were designed primarily for pedestrians at a pedestrian scale, rather than modern 'master-planned communities' that are at best islands of walkability in a sea of car-oriented roadways designed to be incredibly unpalatable to traverse by any other means. Much of this is due to modern American zoning, which is among the strictest in the world in terms of separating different uses from each other — "residential" zoning in other countries almost never differentiates single-family housing from other housing, and usually permits quiet auxiliary uses like corner stores, doctor's offices, childcares, etc. (Interestingly, such zoning is known as "Euclidean Zoning" not for any geometric reason but with the town of Euclid, Ohio as its namesake, the plaintiff in a Supreme Court Case establishing such zoning as a legitimate use of the police power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_of_Euclid_v._Ambler_Realty_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_of_Euclid_v._Ambler_Re....)

bobthepanda 4y ago
The origin of the land grid in the US is to facilitate land transactions with standard land plot sizes. So while Brooklyn started out as wall to wall sameness it’s very easy, and predictable, for one person to sell and that particular plot to become individual again. This is not generally true in American subdivisions, where locations are much more varied in shape, available infrastructure, etc. and so development has to be much more context dependent. And of course single use zoning was not introduced into NYC until 1961 so that helps the ease of redevelopment as well.

SkeuomorphicBee 4y ago

Exactly, grids are not perfect, but they are much much better than modern non-grid. Modern non-grid is not made for people, it is made for cars, and is incompatible with walking. More specifically, it is the result of optimizing for the wrong thing, it optimizes for getting cars from their houses to the highway and back, sacrificing all local connection and mobility in the process.

ThunderSizzle 4y ago
While the modern non-grid is "made for cars", most examples I've seen is also really inefficient at working for cars, in that most non-grid areas I've seen also suck at moving traffic. Inefficient intersections, poorly designed directional conflicts, etc. all exist heavily in a non-grid area, and the response is typically larger, even more inefficient intersections and more poorly designed directional conflicts. Sometimes the lack of space that a grid typically causes actually brings better traffic engineering. But it's definitely correct that the modern non-grid is definitely not suitable to walking/biking, but that's more due to zoning and centralization of systems (e.g. schools) rather than grid vs. non-grid. It's not like a cul-de-sac for a car couldn't contain an off-shoot to a pedestrian/biking path that cuts a trip significantly for a non-car.
- closeparen 4y ago
  It sits in a kind of weird contradiction, because although one of its characteristics is that it's really only practical to navigate by car (and thus generates traffic!), one of its key design goals is to minimize the car traffic near people's houses. Postwar suburbs have more car traffic in total, but it's okay because it's not in front of your house. But once you go outside of the residential subdivisions, to the places where the traffic has been exiled, they're nightmares. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqQw05Mr63E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqQw05Mr63E
davidw 4y ago
Grids are not perfect, but they are "pretty good" in a lot of different circumstances, and far more adaptable than other street patterns. Living on a cul-de-sac is nice in some ways, but it doesn't do well at all with change or adaptation. Grids were "pretty good" with horses and buggies, pretty good with cars, pretty good with eBikes, and will probably be pretty good with whatever the future holds, rather than being "perfect" for any one way of getting around.

nkrisc 4y ago

You've inspired me as well to ramble about why grids are great. Growing up in Chicago, I have a deep love of the grid. It made sense, it made navigation easy. It made addresses have real meaning. Take the address of the Vic Theater, for example: 3145 N Sheffield. It tells you just about everything you need to know. It tells you that Sheffield is a North/South street. Because it's an odd number it tells you the building is on the East side of the street. The "31" tells you it's on the thirty-one hundred block of Sheffield, which once you learn the streets, tells you it's on the block immediately south of Belmont (3200 North). The "45" tells you it's likely at the very North end of the block, because the typical Chicago block only goes up to about XX60 in addresses. The one thing lacking is the latitude for East/West streets and the longitude for North/South street being encoded in the street name, but you could encode an address as an X,Y pair. The above example address could be: 1000 W, 3145 N. Now I live in suburbia elsewhere in the country and street numbers are essentially meaningless, except to differentiate buildings on the same street. Which I suppose is their most basic purpose, but I'm used to addresses being useful for city-wide navigation, so it always felt a bit lacking to me. And don't get me started on my love for and the current lack of alleys where I live now. Chicago alleys are the unsung hero of the city's layout. Just in time edit: It was pointed that I forgot one of the most important things: the numbering system encodes distance as well. Every 100 on the grid, or one full block, is 1/8 of a mile.

turtlesdown11 4y ago
Grids are great. But just think of systems like Venice, where you get a building number + district for an address. No street names tied to the buildings at all. Just a number and the sestiere (there are six).
- nkrisc 4y ago
  That sounds... difficult. I lived in Costa Rica for a brief while and outside of San Jose or town centers most addresses were something like "100 meters east of the statue of the Virgin Mary on calle uno" so at least there were some directions attached. Assuming you knew where the statue of the Virgin Mary was in whatever town, and which way North was.

rhn_mk1 4y ago

Can you provide an example of a "modern non-grid"?

davidw 4y ago

This might look familiar to you, beej: https://bendyimby.com/2018/03/03/street-grids/ https://bendyimby.com/2018/03/03/street-grids/ - goes into some of why grids are good. 'Cookie cutter' construction has a bad reputation, BTW, but cookie cutters are how you get lots of cheap cookies, which a lot of places need right now. The problem is where you don't allow those areas to adapt and change over time, by, say, turning one lot into a corner store or a small cafe or people to adapt their houses over time so they take on their own unique character.

lifefeed 4y ago

Tucked away in the middle of any urban planning article is a reference to Jane Jacob's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". It's a great book that puts into words why certain neighborhoods cities feel alive and fit for humans. From mixed-use buildings to small blocks to sidewalks to parks to landmarks. I'm not going to say her insights are universal for everyone, but it might help you understand why you like that grid you like.

ghaff 4y ago
>I'm not going to say her insights are universal for everyone, but it might help you understand why you like that grid you like. Jacobs is really interesting. My one caveat is that I think a lot of people who applaud her helping to block Moses' highway plans for Washington Square Park would probably be less enthusiastic about her support for what was effectively community self-determination. I suspect many would call it NIMBYism because I'm pretty sure making the West Village more affordable wasn't her top priority. (That said, it was a very different environment in NYC in the 1950s than it became in the 70s/80s than it is today.)
- closeparen 4y ago
  Jacobs combines praise for a very particular type of urban fabric (and a detailed, insightful explication of why it's good) with ideas about preservation and local self-determination, which in her time functioned as a bulwark against modern car-centric design. Now you see NIMBYs who are attached to the "modern" suburban planning regime she helped to fight off, using the same rhetoric to prevent the formation of the same kind of neighborhood she was defending, now that it's back in style.
- ismokedoinks 4y ago
  In Death and Life she talks about "diversity", which was more about housing types and prices rather than like demographic diversity, but often accomplished the same thing. Definitely a way of making things more affordable.
midoridensha 4y ago
Jane should come here to Tokyo to see what a city that's largely fit for humans is like in modern times. Zoning rules here are basically the opposite of America's, and walkability is the norm in most parts of the city (with excellent public transit connecting the most popular districts).