Ensemble and master plan
Street grid
neighborhood plan campus housing complex city center
It is the layout of streets, lots and buildings that orders a city, a neighborhood or a campus. The best known is the grid of straight streets crossing at right angles.
What it solves
It gives each lot a street frontage and allows growth in parts without losing order. A fine grain, with many corners, shortens walking routes and distributes traffic.
Today
Design a layout that connects with neighboring streets, with short blocks and footpaths where the street cannot continue. Fit it to the slope and watercourses instead of imposing the grid on the land.
Common mistake
Laying out a development with a single entrance and dead-end streets that force long detours by car.
Tomorrow
An open layout lets a development grow in phases and change use without rebuilding what exists. If it leaves green corridors in its plan, it also connects trees, water and wildlife.
Fact The 1811 plan for Manhattan set blocks about 61 meters wide and between 150 and 270 meters long.
Where it comes from
- 1Indus Valley Mohenjo-daro, Pakistan, around 2600 BC
Its blocks were divided by straight north-south and east-west streets. Each was subdivided by smaller lanes. - 2Classical Greece Thurii, Italy, 5th century BC
Hippodamus of Miletus laid out in 440 BC a city of streets crossing at right angles around an agora. - 3Ordinances of settlement of 1573 Spanish America, 16th century
They set the checkerboard plan that grows from a central plaza with eight main streets leaving from its corners. - 4Colonial period in Costa Rica San José, Costa Rica, late 18th century
The grid around the plaza and the church was consolidated with the 1793 plan that distributed the lots of the central district.
Masters
- Le Corbusier Chandigarh plan, Chandigarh, India, 1951
He changed a curving layout into a grid of large sectors and separated seven types of road, from highway to footpath. He teaches how the layout shapes the life of an entire city.
Appears in the routes
See also
Also in Ensemble and master plan
Diagrams and texts by LDB Arquitectura. They are shared under the CC BY 4.0 license, which allows them to be used and adapted with credit to the source.