Cities
Grid cities and tangled cities ask different things of the person walking them
A street plan is a record of how a city was made, and it decides whether you navigate by coordinates or by landmarks.
By Samar Bhatia4 min read
Two ways a street plan comes into existence
Broadly, street plans arrive by one of two routes. Either somebody surveyed the ground before there was much on it and imposed a geometry — a grid, a set of radiating avenues, a planned extension drawn on a table — or the streets grew out of things that were already there: field boundaries, a stream, the track between two villages, the line of a wall, the plot a family happened to own.
The imposed kind usually needs an event to make it possible. A fire that cleared a quarter, a colonial foundation on ground the planners treated as empty, a nineteenth-century expansion beyond fortifications that had just been declared obsolete, a post-war rebuild. Regularity is expensive and disruptive, so it tends to follow a rupture.
The grown kind needs only time and the absence of anyone with the authority to stop it. Its logic is entirely local. Each street made sense in relation to the two or three things next to it, and nobody was ever holding the whole shape in mind, which is why the result looks irrational from above and is generally quite sensible on the ground.
A grid is forgiving to navigate and dishonest about distance
The great virtue of a grid is that you cannot get permanently lost in one. Any wrong turn is recoverable by turning twice more, addresses can often be computed rather than remembered, and you can hold your position with two numbers. For a visitor this removes most of the anxiety of a first day, which is not nothing.
Grids also produce long sightlines, and long sightlines change how a walk feels. You can see your destination from a long way off, which makes the distance seem manageable and then makes it feel interminable. Cities that fix this do it by breaking the view — a square, a bend, a change of width — and the ones that do not can be exhausting to cross on foot even when the numbers say the walk is modest.
A tangled plan has to be learned as a sequence
In an accreted old quarter, coordinates stop working. There is no consistent north, streets change name every fifty metres, and the map on your phone will happily send you down a passage that turns out to be a courtyard. What replaces coordinates is a chain of landmarks: the fountain, then left at the church with the two doors, then the street that smells of the fish market.
That is a slower way to learn a place and a more durable one. Sequence memory is what people who live in such districts are actually using, and it is why they can give directions confidently while being unable to tell you which way is east. It also means a first-time visitor genuinely cannot shortcut the process; you learn the route by walking it, twice.
Most cities are several plans stacked in rings
Very few places are purely one thing. The common European pattern is a small irregular core, then a nineteenth-century extension laid out on some regular scheme when the walls came down, then interwar and post-war growth that follows roads and railways outwards, then whatever the last few decades produced at the edges. Each ring has its own grain, and the seams between them are visible on any map if you look for a line where the texture changes.
Those seams are usually a former boundary. A ring of unusually wide streets very often marks demolished fortifications; a strangely straight green strip is frequently a filled canal or a lifted railway. Reading the plan this way turns a map into a rough chronology, and it takes about a minute per city.
For a walker, the practical consequence is that a route crossing several rings will change character several times, and that changes of character are where the interesting things are. A walk that stays in one ring is a more consistent experience and usually a less informative one.
What this means for planning a day on foot
In a regular plan, distance is predictable and you can plan a day by measuring it. Blocks are consistent, the route is more or less the straight-line distance plus a modest penalty, and a mapped walk will take roughly what the map says. Fatigue will arrive faster than the distance suggests, because the walking is monotonous.
In a tangled plan the opposite holds. Every mapped distance is optimistic, since you will overshoot, backtrack and be diverted by things that were not on any plan, and a couple of kilometres can absorb an afternoon. That is not a failure of planning. It is more or less the point, and the correct response is to plan half as much.
The one rule that survives both cases: whatever the plan, the edges between them are worth walking deliberately rather than crossing by transport. Underground, every city is the same city.
Common questions
Why do so many old cities have a ring road exactly where the walls were?
Because the walls occupied a continuous strip of land in single public ownership, and when fortifications were made obsolete by artillery and by expansion, that strip was the only continuous space available. It became boulevards, parks or a railway, and later a road. The ring is the wall, converted.
Are gridded cities always modern?
No. Grid planning is ancient and appears in Roman colonial towns, in planned settlements of many periods and across several continents. What is modern is the scale — the very large uniform grids date mostly from the nineteenth century onwards, when survey, land speculation and rapid growth arrived together.
Is a phone map enough in an old quarter?
It is enough to stop you being genuinely lost and not enough to navigate efficiently. Passages, steps, gates that close at night and courtyards that look like through-routes are exactly the features that mapping handles worst, so treat the blue dot as a fallback rather than the plan.
Senior writer, The Next Postcard
Samar has written about cities, slow routes, rail & road for most of the last decade and is happiest when a piece answers the question completely.
