Most cities in the US have a grid-based street structure. But it's rarely a perfect grid: sometimes the vagaries of history, geography, or convenience lead to deviations from right angles. And sometimes, rival urban planners simply disagree:
When two city planners hate each other: pic.twitter.com/LSb7k8KoaW
— Wilson 🏳️🌈🌹 (@the_sidecarist) March 8, 2018
Geoff Boeing, an urban planning postdoc at UC Berkeley, developed an interesting way to visualize the "griddedness" of cities, by summarizing at the distribution of street segments in a polar plot (you can see the Python code behind the charts here):
I was surprised to see Seattle with such a regular north-south/east-west distribution, whereas in fact each Seattle neighborhood has its one grid aligned to its own orientation (often dictated by the shape of the local coastline). But of course the polar chart depends on how much of the city you include, and I suppose the one above includes just the downtown streets. But you can create your own charts using any zone you like, using this online tool by Randy Olson:
That's all for the blog for this week. Have a great weekend, and we'll be back on Monday. See you then!
Another fine illusion: in this one, the pairs of horizontal lines are all smooth sine curves, despite the appearance of the jagged zig-zags:
It's really hard for me at least to tell that the zig-zags in the light grey region are actually curved. Zooming all the way in may help if you want to check for yourself.
That's all from us at the blog for this week. Next week, we'll be taking a break for the week of the US Independence Day holiday, but we'll be back the week of Monday July 9, reporting from the useR! conference in Brisbane. In the meantime, have a great weekend!
In 1978, a 59-story skyscraper in New York City was at risk of collapse. An engineering flaw, serendipitously discovered by an architecture PhD candidate studying the Citigroup Center as a thesis project, meant the building was unexpectedly susceptible to winds — and hurricane Ella was bearing down on the eastern seaboard. Meanwhile, 2500 Red Cross volunteers were on standby to execute a 10-block-radius evacuation plan should the building topple (and possibly cause a domino-like chain reaction), while engineers worked to reinforce the structural integrity of the building. And all of this happened in secret.
A recent tweet from a former resident of the building reminded me of this remarkable story. To learn more about the unusual stilt-based design of the building and how the design flaw was discovered, check out the article from 99% Invisible or listen to the accompanying podcast.
That's all from us for this week. Have a great weekend, and we'll be back with more next week.
Follow David on Twitter: @revodavid
