Odd Things Happen When You Chop Up Cities and Stack Them Sideways | Hacker News Reader

Odd Things Happen When You Chop Up Cities and Stack Them Sideways

npr.org

353 pointsmissechokit66 comments

An interesting article, sure, but there's a small problem. The section of Istanbul that they've chosen (centered here: https://maps.google.com/?ll=41.044081,29.096603&spn=0.04...) is actually on the Anatolian side of the Bosphorus, and it's one of the newer neighborhoods. The streets are actually arranged like that because of the terrain, more than because of history.

That said, this is a case of being right for the wrong reason. Istanbul is an amazing city to walk through. It's like the worlds largest living maze, and you're never quite sure where you'll pop out.

For example, the first time I was there, we turned a corner down an alley to try and get to one of the main roads. The alley started out wide enough for us to walk three-abreast, but quickly narrowed. At some point I looked up and noticed that there was now a roof over our heads. Eventually the alley narrowed to where we had to turn sideways to squeeze past people coming in the opposite direction, and there were shop counters on either side. A few feet more, and we stepped out onto the main street we had been looking for. I turned around, but where I expected to see the alley was, instead, what looked like a regular store-front, identical to all those next to it on either side...

But you don't have to believe me. Yandex has great walking maps of Istanbul! Here's the location I was just describing: http://harita.yandex.com.tr/-/CVeLjW60

That is amazing, "Touristic Bazaar" indeed.

Came here to point this out, too. Would be interesting if they redo the analysis on the old part of town. Where was teh alley that you are referring to? Near the Grand Bazaar (Kapali Carsi)?

No, just off of Istiklal Caddesi. Actually, Istiklal is interesting in that it is somewhat isolated, and almost every alley leading you to it (except for a few major ones) is a different adventure. Istiklal also has a number of "pasajlar" that are their own adventure (but sadly, don't appear in Yandex last I checked). Kapali Carsi has some more amazing routes, and just down from Istiklal is Cezayir Sokagi which, despite being called a "street", is more of a staircase but also has some of the best French restaurants in the city.

If you haven't been to Istanbul, you really must go!

Edit: Oh, and I imagine if they did this analysis with one of the really old parts of town, it would be even more extreme...the problem would be finding an accurate map!

I think there is more to it than the terrain and history. Turkish culture has an inclination towards irregularity. You have to constantly improvise or think, when making a decision, there are no well set out rules of living. This reflects to every part of life including the cities. The upside is that Turkish people are alert while walking on the street or any time of their life, which creates an active culture. The downsides are many, e.g. bad things happen in case of an accident or catastrophe.

Honestly, I found most interesting about that was the Hello Kitty Handbags. Just one of those, wow it's a smaller world than you might think.

Istanbul indeed is an amazing city to walk through, but I think it's more so for tourists who find it exotic. Having lived here for more than a year now I find the streets here quite frustrating - because of the irregularity, extreme density and especially because of the ascents/hills. I am talking purely from the perspective of getting from point A to B in a daily life. I commute to work by walking, takes only 15 minutes; but I go down and up a very steep ascent so I have to sweat twice a day :) Not to mention the cars which gets past quite fast just an inch away from me while I myself am just inch away from the edge of the road.

I still love this city with all its beauty and uniqueness. What I like most is that there are endless amount places to go, see a and discover. But when it comes city-structure, it's the roads that I miss most about US and Kazakhstan where there is a concept of a "sidewalk" and "road" (an actual, real road) - I think you know what I mean by this :)

Paris shouldn't be too surprising. While the city is quite old, it was reshaped and modernized in the mid-19th century.

See, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmanns_renovation_of_Paris

Interesting article. But the link does not (currently) work without the apostrophe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...

Now it does. ;)

I've been transfixed with the idea of 'Digital Comparative Studies of Cities' (or some similar turn of phrase).

With the advent of mapping projects (GoogleMaps, Openstreetmap, etc), environmental sensor networks (my startup's area), and cheaper LiDAR arrays (for point cloud mappings of buildings and terrain...now in CMOS form) - we'll be able to quantify the homogeny of surbanization, architectural 'themes', road uniformity, development rates, etc over time.

There are lots of similarly clever projects cited on BLDGBlog [1] if you're into this kind of thing.

[1] http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/

> quantify the homogeny of surbanization, architectural 'themes'

You'll be interested in this paper http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/whatMakesParis/

Istanbul's layout is downright Byzantine.

Oh, I see what you did there :). Have an upboat.

all those crooked, lopsided, curvaceous streets, going off in so many directions, I can't help wondering, what would it be like to wander there?

It would be like the suburbs in the US. Houses are all on cul-de-sacs that wind around and eventually join larger streets which eventually join arterial streets. Pretty much like the map of Istanbul they chose.

Cul-de-sac suburban developments rarely connect to neighboring developments. They don't even always connect to all of the larger streets that they border.

This lack of connectivity between them is the primary criticism. The map of Istanbul suggests that you might wander into a dead-end alley or cul-de-sac, but one does not enter what amounts to a neighborhood full of dead-ends, the only exit from which is the way you came in. It certainly doesn't suggest that any notable fraction of city is subdivided that way.

I don't buy it at all. One of the things I love about Italy is that the level of diversity and odd details in the architecture is amazing, and "fractal" in the more pop-science sense of being able to look at things closer and closer and find new and interesting things to see.

I find US burbs incredibly boring in their sameness, although they do have other advantages.

Something tells me you've either never walked around Istanbul, or you've never walked around a suburb, or both.

Would love to see Boston added. (Most believe that Boston city planners used the throw-spaghetti-against-the-wall method of city planning.)

I heard that Boston's layout was the result of paving cow paths.

That's hogwash, they were goat paths!

That may be partially accurate, the large park in the center (Boston Common) was originally a public grazing area. But Boston was originally a small round island at the end of a long isthmus and many streets are spokes or perimeter arcs around the waterfront or older obstructions. Incredible amounts of landfill in the 1800s changed the borders of the city but by then core roads had been long established.

I agree. It would be pretty interesting.

I thought Boston was the most European-like city I ever visited in the US. To be honest, it was the only one that really appealed to me, as a place.

Same here, although I was there only for a (long) week-end, I really liked the city.

I've also stayed several days in SF, but did not quite like it as much as Boston.

In contrast, I've stayed 6 months in DC, which I ... hum ... did not particularly like.

BTW, I agree. I lived in the Boston area (mostly across the river in Cambridge) for over a decade and still miss it somewhat.

OTOH, I do not miss winter in Boston. When they paved over the cowpaths, they didn't leave room for snow removal.

I used to live in Istanbul, I actually lived in the section shown on this map. I can verify from walking hundreds of miles through those serpentine back roads that wandering Istanbul is a beautiful experience.

Allan Jacobs' book Great Streets contains dozens of this type of map, not chopped up, but showing the street systems all at the same scale. It's absolutely fascinating to compare 'Cisco to Houston to Paris to Venice. A highly recommended book. http://www.amazon.com/Great-Streets-Allan-B-Jacobs/dp/026260...

where is "'Cisco"?

I am assuming San Fran'cisco' is being referred here.

Yep. People used to call it that.

Humorous post. I can't say that I am surprised by Paris dissected. All those small streets and alleys creates a lot of small segments and those small segments, when looked from above, will seem monotonous and all in the same shape. It seems that it is mostly the larger segments that are oddly shaped and that is not really surprising.

Something that also doesn't carry over this interesting approach is the land area. Paris is only 105.4 km2, New York City is roughly 7 times as large, Berlin 9 times and you could fit 50 Paris inside Istanbul as a whole. Those tiny segments are really, really tiny - they don't have the time to be oddly shaped over just a few dozen meters ;)

There seems to be a value judgement here: that curvy and uniquely shaped streets are superior in some way. This can be decided with objective evidence: look at how city districts flourish, and see whether it is related to the shape of the city blocks.

I'd be amazing to see that data (which I doubt exists) over major technology changes in living style and transportation.

While I take your point, define "flourish", and you're back to value judgements.

Original URL (with a few more cities):

http://www.armellecaron.fr/art/index.php?page=plans_de_berli...

Thanks!

But it still doesn't mention what sorting key was used to arrange the pieces? Similarity in shape, obviously, but by what measure?

Since it's an art project, it might even have been done semi-manually, by eye?

Paris looks more homogeneous than it is simply because they analyzed a bigger area, or at least an area with more pieces. For example if you analyzed the entirety of Istanbul, then for almost every piece you could probably find a very similar piece elsewhere.

I've always thought that American roads suck for exactly this reason.

They're so boring. -__-

In the cities (where this is true), that is a good thing. City streets are about efficiency of transport. A road that seems to go straight to your destination but then ends abruptly is not a good thing. Freeways are boring for the same reason. They're not meant to be exciting, they're meant to be roads.

Country roads in America are anything but boring, though. Some of them are bordering on downright dangerous with the twists, turns, and hills. I've never heard anyone argue that city streets were too efficient.

You may hear the first argument from me, though it's not mine. The Interstate Highway in America was modelled after the Autobahn in Germany. But we made two dramatic changes: (1) we put the highways right through cities instead of alongside them, and (2) we cut through the landscape rather than adhering to it (so our roads could be straight instead of winding).

There have been a few unintended consequences of those decisions. First, the highways literally divided cities like walls, cutting neighborhood access off from one community to another. I live close enough to my downtown to walk, but to do so, I'd have to cross a highway.

Second, there's some consensus among researchers that the long, straight stretches of highway contribute to driver fatigue in a way that a more active driving experience (from the occasional turns) does not.

While the autobahn curves with the landscape, it's not as dangerous as a country road. And by not dissecting the cities, it makes life in the city more efficient and connected.

This is anecdotal, but I can see this highway dividing towns pretty starkly in Menlo Park. The town is divided East/West by US-101. The difference between West Menlo Park and East Menlo Park is stark, West is filled with incredibly wealthy, white people whereas the East is filled with much poorer, mostly latino and black people.

I-5 is sort of interesting in Seattle. It cut the city in half, and was essentially built right through the middle of a lot of developed areas. Before it was put in, you could walk from First Hill to Downtown, but then they dropped a highway down the middle and had only a couple of roads cross it. It wasn't until recently that walking from First Hill to downtown could require a mile or two of extra walking to get to one of the streets that crossed the highway.

Note that it wasn't always an unintended consequence. When Robert Moses built the expressway and parkway systems in NYC, he expressly targeted black and puerto rican neighborhoods to bear the brunt of the impact. On Long Island, his bulldozers sliced small farms in two, but avoided the great estates of the mega rich -- at huge expense to both taxpayers and generations of commuters.

Your comment is completely factual but interestingly from the POV of a car driver (ie, classically north american).

Walking streets in north american cities is soul-killing compared to cities in other continents.

> Walking streets in north american cities is soul-killing compared to cities in other continents.

It's even more soul-killing to walk the sidewalks of the suburbs. Try to imagine growing up in one.

One significant flaw in many cities is the lack of distinction between streets and roads:

http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2012/8/20/roads-streets-s...

Quoting a bit from that article:

> To review, a road is an efficient connection between two places. It is high speed and safe, which implies that it has limited access (intersections are inherently unsafe at high speeds) and highway geometries. It is essentially a replacement for the railroad which was, as its name suggests, a road on rails.

> In contrast, streets create a platform for capturing value. A properly designed street will maximize the value of the adjacent development pattern in ratio to the infrastructure investment within the public realm. To do this, auto traffic will be slow and will (equally) share space with other modes of transport, including pedestrians, bikers and transit alternatives.

Love this project! I'm curious to find out how Indian cities would hold up to this exercise. A city like Delhi that is made up of 7+ old and new cities, Mumbai which is sea front and hard pressed for real estate (which important city isn't?!) and Bangalore which has very old green parts and very new barren areas would all be fun to map.

One other interesting exercise would be to map the cities over time. A satellite view image from the 1960's and one from 2012. Could throw up interesting anthropomorphical results.

This reminds me of Ursus Wehrli's work. http://www.ted.com/talks/ursus_wehrli_tidies_up_art.html

I have a fondness for geography and maps, so I am delighted to see this posted here. Big Think covered this back in February, 2011: http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/502-hung-out-to-dry-a-taxon....

The above article is part of Big Think's Strange Maps, a fantastic blog which has many, many more interesting articles!

What are the odd things - I only scanned the article but it seemed pretty much to show expected results. The whole is more than the sum of parts.

He never says what "odd things" happen. He just organizes blocks and then marvels at what it looks like in a completely boring way.

He spent all his allotted time making the figures, apparently, and took no time to thinking of anything interesting to say about it or describe these "odd things" he teases in the title.

Glad to see this article is up on the front page. I submitted it two days ago and it never got traction.

Question about article submissions - in the past when I've submitted a duplicate article it takes me to that HN posting instead. What are the edge cases where identical articles get posted separately on HN?

I believe the URL parameters at the end of the submitted URL above make it unique.

?sc=tw&cc=share&utm_source=buffer&buffer_share=f34b7

I've seen this issue pop up a few times before on HN.

Whoops--I had no idea! And I was shocked to see that it had this much traction myself.

No, it's cool that you got it up. I thought it was really neat from a visualization standpoint. You probably just submitted at a more fortunate time of day.

We have so much rich geographical data and it's always refreshing to see someone (the artist / architect) asking simple questions about it. I'm much more excited about the work itself than Krulwich's commentary (for as much as I like him). Cities are rich with spatially disjoint points of similarity.

I'd be curious to see how old cultural cities like Mumbai, Cairo etc. will look like when they are "chopped". I'm sure they won't look anything different from Istanbul.

Including Salt Lake City would be humorous.

http://tinyurl.com/8e2f27l

Mumbai is an excellent case for dissection.

Or New Delhi for that matter.

Nice. Would love to see Tokyo. My guess is it would be a mix of NY and Istanbul chunks, depending on the area.

Doesnt say anything about the sources or methology. I guess footways and the like were not used in this.

I don't find this interesting at all. What is the point of doing that?

The Situationists meets William S. Burroughs

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