Quote:
Originally Posted by 10023
But on the other hand, all of those “organic” roads, not the side streets but the main, ancient ones, actually go somewhere. They connect one significant point of interest to another. And that has its own benefits, particularly for wandering. Anyone can figure out how to get from 3rd and 15th to 7th and 43rd, but what exactly is in either of those locations?
In those aerial photos above, I can instantly identify exactly what I’m looking at. Victoria, St Paul’s, Seven Dials, Trafalgar Square. It would be a pain in the ass for a tourist trying to drive around London (but then why the fuck would you do that?), but it creates places rather than just intersections.
New York has “places” mostly where the grid is broken - Washington Square Park, Union Square, Madison Square Park, Columbus Circle, even Rockefeller Center (which has pedestrian “streets” that cut through a megablock).
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I like the simplicity of grids, but I also feel that grids *primarily* benefit cars and mechanized transit in general. As a pedestrian and fan of subways and other forms of rapid mass transit, more organic forms of street design appeal to me as more human and humane. Paris has what I find to be a pretty good compromise between the two. Their major streets connect major points, and provide structure to the city. Smaller streets help ensure more direct pedestrian routes between daily resident needs. Chicago, on the other hand, which is, by some measures, the most strictly gridded city in the world, makes navigating the city pretty straightforward, but can increase trip length between any given two points by over 40% in the worst case scenario. In a car, that can be annoying, but as a pedestrian it can dramatically reduce your efficient navigation of the city and limit what you can accomplish. As such, my favorite streets in Chicago are often the few diagonals that the city has allowed itself to tolerate. I wish the city had more diagonals, but instead it has fewer diagonals now than it did before the demolition of Ogden north of Chicago Avenue.
Were I the emperor of Chicago, I'd require that some of the mega-projects connect to the grid on their outer edges, and maybe pull the grid through along any of the major, mile-market streets that transit the land, but otherwise require that large areas such as the former Cabrini area, or the so-called "78" or parts of Englewood or Douglas or the former US Steel site or the "Lincoln Yards" areas be plotted out with a pedestrian-friendly, organic streets instead of strict grid adherence. I think that over time that would make those some of the most desirable parts of the city precisely because they'd be the exceptions and not the rule.
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