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Comment by chton | Hacker News Reader

The difference between European and Japanese old cities, and American 'new' cities is incredibly obvious. As a European, something like Chicago just doesn't look natural, like it's not a real city. On the other hand, I'm sure our cities look like a chaotic mess to Americans :)

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America has these cities too - old East Coast cities like Boston are a mess. Because they were built in the days of horses and carts too.

Just look at Boston versus Berlin in the article. Even the "messy" Boston looks unnaturally organized for me (I'm German, though not from Berlin).

My thoughts exactly. Boston looks more patchwork than chaos. The only one approaching the European style is DC, and even that is not quite the same.

the organized parts of Boston are largely landfill that did not even exist until the 1800's[1]. If you look at the old parts, it looks like Berlin.

[1] http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/fa267/boston/growth.g...

This joke has been going around for a few years: http://jefferly.com/2013/01/04/street-grids-ny-vs-boston/

Washington is actually a much better example of an organic-ish area, in terms of street grain. This is pretty ironic, given that the City of Washington (originally just one part of the District of Columbia) was totally planned.

What's fascinating is that the colouring pretty much lets you see how the city grew, area by area, at least in cities like London and Boston that grew more organically.

Actually, Tokyo is a new Japanese city - and the much older Kyoto has a pretty strict grid layout.

Tokyo is the renaming of Edo, while much younger than Kyoto it can hardly be called a new city when it predates the columbian voyages and gave its name to Japan's 17th-19th century period.

Kyoto is actually an example of "artificial" and inorganic city, it's a replica of Chang'an which stemmed from the highly structured square-based chinese urban planning (although Chang'an wasn't strictly square for astrological and physical reason)

Q: What's the difference between an American and a European?

A: A European thinks that 100km is a pretty big distance. An American thinks that 100 years are a pretty long time.

In Belgian traffic, 100km takes 100 years to drive, so they're both right :p

I'll side with the American: pretty much anyone can go 100km, and pretty much no one can go 100 years.

As a european, I can go more than 100km, but I very rarely do go anywhere near that far - our towns are based on the assumption of walking rather than the assumption of driving, so anything more than a 15 minute walk away is "exotic"; on the other hand, the architecture I walk past between my home and the office is just about to celebrate its 1000th birthday :)

Tokyo is still far older than any US cities, and more importantly it grew organically. Kyoto is much older, yes, but it is a stricter grid only because the entire city was built that way in the 8th century. Unlike Tokyo, most European cities, and most American ones, it wasn't a town that grew bigger organically. City architects in those days must have really liked the straight lines.

Edit: Masklinn explained it far more elegantly than I could, listen to them :)

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