Visualizing the Hidden ‘Logic’ of Cities | Hacker News Reader

Visualizing the Hidden ‘Logic’ of Cities

citylab.com

75 pointsDanBC10 comments

This is maybe the main thing I noticed as a European visiting the US. It also made me realise why I thought the early versions of SimCity were somehow not entirely satisfying.

You'll come across this in movies now and again, someone will use "blocks" as a measure of distance within the city, but if you've grown up in Europe it makes no sense at all. The space between streets here varies a lot, it's not just a grid where you can say "up three, turn left, along four".

Conversely, navigating a European city is a very confusing experience (even for a European), whereas driving around from point A to point B in e.g. L.A. is a no-brainer.

Well, L.A. has its own difficulty, at a larger scale, with the tangle of freeways and ramps, special lanes, multiple names for freeways, etc.

Surface streets do follow that nice, logical grid, though.

>whereas driving around from point A to point B in e.g. L.A. is a no-brainer.

... in theory.

Now getting around Manhattan is truly a no brainer!

Try Salt Lake City, Utah. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/plat-of-zion/

I felt this visiting Ottawa. I was aware of things being in blocks, but never that the blocks themselves were so comparatively huge that you could see why cars are so depended upon. The amount of spread felt impossibly huge yet at the same time, it didn't really lend to a feeling of openness. You were just dealing with wider roads and taller buildings.

Compare it to my later years in Barcelona, which has a grid of its own, and those are much smaller. You can still walk the breadth of the city in just over 90 minutes or so; cycling it in much less.

This is interesting, but it should not be called the "Logic" of cities. Maybe "Orientation" of cities.

Agreed, I was hoping of a visualization of travel flow, infrastructure (logistics, grid, plumbing, ...), evolution of districts or something in that vain.

Logic is the wrong term here.

I really loved the minimal Mapbox implementation of the concept! (by Vladimir Agafonkin)

https://jsfiddle.net/Mourner/zbdu3fkg/

While this is a great visualization, I think that it is missing the traffic volume, which would paint a much more accurate picture of how cities actually work. I say this looking at San Diego where if you want to know how the city is designed and how traffic actually flows, there should be 3 big lines running from south south east to north north west (or similar) because those are the 3 major freeways. Instead you have a big north south signal which is not actually reflective of how any traffic flows.

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