Maps of Street Layouts Colored by Orientation

http://www.datapointed.net/2014/10/maps-of-street-grids-by-orientation/

by forrest_t • 12 years ago

85 21 12 years ago

quarterto• 12 years ago

The European cities really remind me of Mike Bostock's visualisation of spanning trees: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/11377353 which makes sense when you think about it.

chton4• 12 years ago

The difference between European and Japanese old cities, and American 'new' cities is incredibly obvious. As a European, something like Chicago just doesn't look natural, like it's not a real city. On the other hand, I'm sure our cities look like a chaotic mess to Americans :)

JoeAltmaier• 12 years ago

America has these cities too - old East Coast cities like Boston are a mess. Because they were built in the days of horses and carts too.

hibbelig• 12 years ago

Just look at Boston versus Berlin in the article. Even the "messy" Boston looks unnaturally organized for me (I'm German, though not from Berlin).

sp332• 12 years ago

This joke has been going around for a few years: http://jefferly.com/2013/01/04/street-grids-ny-vs-boston/

embolalia• 12 years ago

Washington is actually a much better example of an organic-ish area, in terms of street grain. This is pretty ironic, given that the City of Washington (originally just one part of the District of Columbia) was totally planned.

brazzy2• 12 years ago

Actually, Tokyo is a new Japanese city - and the much older Kyoto has a pretty strict grid layout.

masklinn• 12 years ago

Tokyo is the renaming of Edo, while much younger than Kyoto it can hardly be called a new city when it predates the columbian voyages and gave its name to Japan's 17th-19th century period.

Kyoto is actually an example of "artificial" and inorganic city, it's a replica of Chang'an which stemmed from the highly structured square-based chinese urban planning (although Chang'an wasn't strictly square for astrological and physical reason)

chton4• 12 years ago

Tokyo is still far older than any US cities, and more importantly it grew organically. Kyoto is much older, yes, but it is a stricter grid only because the entire city was built that way in the 8th century. Unlike Tokyo, most European cities, and most American ones, it wasn't a town that grew bigger organically. City architects in those days must have really liked the straight lines.

Edit: Masklinn explained it far more elegantly than I could, listen to them :)

mhandley• 12 years ago

What's fascinating is that the colouring pretty much lets you see how the city grew, area by area, at least in cities like London and Boston that grew more organically.

japhyr• 12 years ago

I got lost in this site for a while, in a good way. I highly recommend clicking through to some of the other articles on the site.

acadien• 12 years ago

This is the same method we use in studying grain boundary formation in materials science. Atomic lattices align at different angles and are colorized accordingly. It is so cool to see the same idea applied to maps!

sgnelson• 12 years ago

Seth Kadish did something very similar, though he used Rose Diagrams rather than colors.

http://vizual-statistix.tumblr.com/post/80468941142/unlike-l...

sevengraff• 12 years ago

Any way to export these colorful maps to a png? I desire them as a desktop wallpaper, they are wonderful.

maxmcd• 12 years ago

The zoomable-versions use leaflet, so this might be worth a look: https://github.com/mapbox/leaflet-image

Maps of Street Layouts Colored by Orientation

Related Stories