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from the picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words dept.
Geoff Boeing has written an article about the program he wrote for his Urban Planning PhD dissertation that looks like a very interesting tool. The results are just plain pretty.
The heart of Allan Jacobs' classic book on street-level urban form and design, Great Streets , features dozens of hand-drawn figure-ground diagrams in the style of Nolli maps. Each depicts one square mile of a city's street network. Drawing these cities at the same scale provides a revealing spatial objectivity in visually comparing their street networks and urban forms.
We can recreate these visualizations automatically with Python and the OSMnx package, which I developed as part of my dissertation. With OSMnx we can download a street network from OpenStreetMap for anywhere in the world in just one line of code. Here are the square-mile diagrams of Portland, San Francisco, Irvine, and Rome created and plotted automatically by OSMnx: [Ed. Note: See source article for pictures.]
The top row depicts the late 19th century orthogonal grids of Portland, Oregon and San Francisco, California. Portland's famously compact walkable blocks are clearly visible but its grid is interrupted by the Interstate 405 which tore through the central city in the 1960s. In the bottom row, the business park in suburban Irvine, California demonstrates the coarse-grained, modernist, auto-centric urban form that characterized American urbanization in the latter half of the 20th century. In stark contrast, Rome has a fine-grained, complex, organic form evolved over millennia of self-organization and urban planning.
Boeing, G. 2017. "OSMnx: New Methods for Acquiring, Constructing, Analyzing, and Visualizing Complex Street Networks." Manuscript under review. DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2865501. Full PDF
(Score: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Sunday February 19 2017, @11:59PM
Insight from chaotic visuals is called divination,
Not sure there is much insight gained by these simplified block diagrams stressing layout more than usage, of an arbitrary
section of a city.
Specifically hidden are the tangle of one way streets, hills, and traffic flow, and actual usage, in favor of presenting what you can
see in any city by just looking at the map or zooming out Google Maps.
The square mile selected is purely arbitrary, and if there are any valid conclusions to be drawn they would all be
useless if you drop your square mile a grid anywhere else in the city.
I doubt there is any thing to be learned here, seems like sort of an art's major discovering maps for the first time.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.