Road Networks & Livable Cities

When I walk around my adopted city of Boston, I continually find myself getting lost. Even having lived in the city for more than a year, I still find myself needing to whip out a map just to navigate cross-town in my car. To some of my New Yorker friends who come to visit, this situation seems downright intolerable. The grid of streets in Manhattan is actually predictable enough that often one can find a street address without knowing the nearest cross-street. Try guessing where an address is in Boston, and you could end up walking a long way- a difference of 100 in the street number could be a distance of one block or twenty!

Still, I’ve fallen in love with Boston’s crazy maze of roads. The myriad street names invoke bits of history (Avenue de Lafayette being my personal favorite), or just sheer whimsy (Bow Street and Arrow Street, for example). More importantly, the range of angles at intersections allows for odd moments of enlightenment (“Oh, that’s where that road goes!”) at 'Squares,’ which are anything but in Boston. After a while, this all makes sense- you just have to memorize a few key places (squares, bridges, etc.), and you can pretty much intuit which road goes where. Place-based navigation, let’s call it. It’s what I grew up with in North Carolina, and it’s what’s most common in cities that grew up slowly. NYC’s grid requires, in contrast, what we might call street-based navigation. It’s efficient, but slightly boring. Some cities have a bit of both, like Washington, DC and its broad avenues, connecting important places, superimposed on a grid.

What’s striking, when you stop to think about it, is how most residential developments built after the 1950s follow neither schema. Suburbs built after that ere typically have a nonsensical pattern of streets, with odd names often disconnected with the ecology or history of the region. The only pattern is that the street network is hierarchical: each subnetwork of roads typically only has one exit, which leads onto a bigger road or highway. In many ways, this highway-based navigation schema has the worst of both worls: less efficient than a grid, and more boring than genuine, unplanned city. It is a typology of nowhere, achieving nothing except the reduction of traffic flow on tertiary streets (at the cost of increasing traffic flow on primary roads), and a strange reification of the subdivision as a mini-kingdom, complete with pseudo border guards in the more high-end versions. It’s important to realize what this typology of a neighborhood does to a city- I’ve even seen some vaunted New Urbanism designs that retain this pattern, and in my opinion they end up failing because of it. It is the economics of developments that have lead to the current pattern, and so landscape architects cannot easily escape these limitations.

Hamlet's Dreams

Comments

[jesse]

interesting post. I would only suggest that perhaps a more apt dichotomy for cities is between those shaped by history in the pre-Haussman era and those essentially designed -or redesigned- afterwards. We could choose to understand "place-based" design as the result of everyone/the commons in picking the best urban layout, the mark of diffused power; and in "street-based" design that of concentration of power in the hands of a few?* In that case, one could argue that it is both the economics and the politics of development that hace lead to the current pattern.

*I do realize that Kings/Churches held considerable and concentrated powers in the pre-industrial era, but they seemed busy using that capital in other projects: construction of palaces and cathedrals, namely.

[gaela]

beautiful, beautiful post. thank you.

[brit]

Thank you for this.

The more I study cities, even as a traveler and not a student, the more I see that great 'places' exceed the definition of simply a monumental building. The traffic-ways that hold the structures and non-structures together create the ambience. The memory. The lure to go back.

London's Trafalgar Square. Incredible place, composed of interesting buildings sewn into a ever colorful and vibrant network of peds, buses, cars, and, yes pigeons that is known as the square itself. I have plenty of other examples if anyone is interested.

I appreciate your insight.