Road expansion in the city
The study of the urban fabric of any city is complex and at the same time necessary to be able to practice that sustainable urbanism that benefits both users and the environment. Many cities have grown without coherent planning and analyzing their road structure and avenue network is really complicated but, thanks to the technology and the work done by Geoff Boeing, now we have it a little easier!
Geoff Boeing is an urban planning scholar at the University of California (Berkeley - USA) and has developed a tool to visualize the consistency of the street network of any city in the world, what he calls urban "logic."
The public access tool using an old geography technique: the «polar» or circular chart, creating a polar histogram (A diagram in the form of a compass rose) where the line of each graph bar is the direction of the streets in relation to to a compass (North, South, East and West) and its longitude, represents the frequency - number of streets in a specific direction.
the road network is the one that organizes all human activity and circulation in the city, so we must understand it
When calculating and representing what percentage of roads in a city run in an orientation and represent it in a circular bar graph, a lot of relevant information can be extracted since the road network is the one that organizes all human activity and circulation in the city, without detracting from … In what direction is a city growing and is that the correct option? If there will be possible obstacles in the future? Where are there less road infrastructures?… etc.
Remember two articles of interest:
- Playing to design urban roads for pedestrians
- How to see the interactive 3D map of your city
For example, the island of Manhattan, extends from South to Southwest to North - Northeast, and most of its streets are parallel or perpendicular to the island in a regular network. The app visualizes that as four long bars, with several shorter bars representing the minority of streets in the municipality that do not line up with the grid, as illustrated in the circular pattern below:
With this tool we can compare different cities in the world and analyze the road structure of them and their growth trends or if an inconsistent organization of streets and avenues has been practiced:
Or compare the road expansion in its orientation of two cities such as Madrid and Barcelona (Let us remember that depending on the zoom that is practiced on the map, the distribution of the diagram will change).
According to Geoff Boeing … “It is a wonderful way to explore how cities are built; understand their patterns and hidden influences. You can see where a road network was meticulously planned and where it grew naturally. You can see subtle connections with the terrain, mountains, rivers … etc and their influence on the direction of the roads.
We can access the interactive tool from HERE to view and explore any city in the world.
And two articles that you have to see and related to the theme; How to understand the anatomy of cities and their blocks, and Big Data by analyzing cities.
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