Street grid
The street grid is the pattern streets and blocks form seen from above: orthogonal as in New York or Barcelona, radial as in Paris, organic as in a medina. It is the most durable layer of the city —buildings change, the grid remains— and decides how much people walk, cross and how much frontage faces the street.
Small blocks, Jane Jacobs argued, multiply possible routes and encounters; the superblocks of modernist estates reduce them. Cerdà's grid in Barcelona shows a regular pattern can stay flexible for 160 years. Analysing the grid is the basis of urban morphology.
Videos on this term (1)
- Urban ecology
Urban River Restoration: What It Is and Examples
Urban river restoration reopens channelised rivers to cut flood risk and heat. What Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika…
2 min read
