busyOff the top of my head, I can think of at least three other city shapes: hexagonal, radial, and vertical.
Now hexagonal was never common, so I'm not surprised they didn't include it. It's super efficient for space but not very convenient for traffic, and humans figured that out fairly fast. But I did find a hexagonal example on a search.
Radial is a spiderweb, with straight crosslines and straight or curved perimeter lines around a focal point. You see it in cities butted against an edge like a lake or mountain, or cities that grow up around a central point like a castle. Here's a nice one with concentric circles, and a bigger one done all in straight lines. This huge one is a bit more gridlike, but you can still follow the pattern of radial and perimeter lines.
Vertical cities go up the side of a mountain or cliff, such as pueblos. Sometimes they have a vertical grid if they are built, other times a more organic pattern if they are stuffed into whatever holes people can find already there. This cliff city basically has a front (the air) and a back (the cliff) and its access ways are mostly stairs and ladders instead of streets. This mountain city seems to have a central access for boats and most of the rest is tall buildings jammed right next to each other. Once again the prevailing direction is up/down and the primary transit is probably stairs, as it looks older and poorer than the kind of city that puts an elevator in every building.
And of course, not everyone cares about efficiency. Here's one based on circles with houses in wedges, which totally do not pack well. This one uses ovals around each house. Very retro, that's what got people trying hexes and later square grids. But if you want that green space in between housing clusters, suddenly these models make a lot more sense.
Another division is between manmade and organic. Grids are manmade, using straight lines and regular patterns. Organic shapes are more random and curvilinear, like some subdivisions, and rarely work as well. (See Stupid Street Design and Stupid Lot Shapes.) In the article, the grids are over-represented in their set of four, and curvilinear shapes -- which do exist -- only somewhat.
Then there's the question of navigation. Modern cities are pretty much built to be easily navigated. They want people to get in and out and around them easily. This was not always so. Once upon a time, cities were sometimes built for defense so that the streets were either a completely chaotic maze, or later on, deliberately designed to slow progress from the rim to the center. It's how you discouraged invaders. You got a similar effect if people just built stuff wherever they felt like it and/or followed natural features such as rivers. Then the Romans popularized the grid. Rome! By firelight! <3 You could charge an army right down those streets on a straight run. For centuries, in fact, barbarian hordes had great fun doing that. Here's a fascinating comparison of which cities have a regular grid and which are tangled.
Come on, math dudes, get your heads out of your cultural bias.
April 17 2016, 04:45:00 UTC 5 years ago
The whole thing is still gridded, though, and as long as you're not picky about what your compass says, you can find any address in King County fairly easily. Doubly so outside of Downtown and close environs...
Well...
April 17 2016, 04:48:16 UTC 5 years ago
Except for the unfortunate fact that many of the streets are numbered, and the numbering restarts all over the place, so that if you say for example "14th Street" there could be a dozen of them none connecting. O_O Been there, lost that.
And the fucking ferries everywhere, do not even get me started.
Re: Well...
April 17 2016, 05:12:10 UTC 5 years ago
The ferries are a necessary evil... Puget Sound is 900' deep and centers on a fault line. The only way to bridge it (other than at the Narrows) is with pontoons, and that would kill your shipping traffic. But you only need ferries to get to Vashon or to Kitsap County, or up to the islands (and to the islands you can ride a floatyplane, no evil nassssty TSA necessary. Unless you cross a border.)
And besides. Ferry on a motorbike is fun. First on, first off, and the thunder of the engines reverberating inside the hull will make your hair stand up... BIG FUN. Vashon also has the best set of twisties right off the boat...
April 17 2016, 12:59:43 UTC 5 years ago Edited: April 17 2016, 13:02:00 UTC
Put it this way, we don't have city planners. In fact, I don't think anyone even thought of planning them until the late 60's early 70's and at that, it was an American. Cities sort of evolved up until then...
So, the most usual type is; "someone dropped a plate of spaghetti and meatballs" design.
Then we have the 60's .. with monolithic blocks of housing in neat grids. all at odd angles to each other and sometimes with a central core of high-rise, that may or may not have been pulled down by now. but we also have the horizontal skyscraper design, which is basically a wall... and we have the counter-culture school to that of lots of open spaces, and the designer threw out his ruler in favour a french curves tool, so it's all loopy curves and circles.
Then we have the 'roman roads in radial or grid, overlayed with long narrow viking plots creating narrow snickleways between the roads.'
and we have looads of radial designs...some of which intermesh. [see London] so the whole thing ends up looking like Escher drawing steampunk gears.
Then there's the ever popular, 'drunkards walk' with a pub on every corner and no straight lines anywhere. which is almost indistinguishable from the; 'any invading b*stards are going to get lost here' design.
but, the most common design is 'designed by committee...several of them, in fact if you include sub-committees it was more like a dozen... and none of them talked to each other.'
Trust me, navigation in Britain is an artform, not a science...
Yes...
April 17 2016, 18:42:42 UTC 5 years ago
I can only conclude that these blokes did their "project" from the safety of an office and picked the easiest, clearest maps they could find. They claim to have included major world cities, but that matches neither my own observations, other map researchers, nor even a quick search. So. Much. Datacropping. :P
April 30 2016, 22:19:12 UTC 5 years ago