My article “Off the Grid… and Back Again? The Recent Evolution of American Street Network Planning and Design” has been published by the Journal of the American Planning Association and won the 2020 Stough-Johansson Springer Award for best paper. It identifies recent nationwide trends in American street network design, measuring how urban planners abandoned the grid and embraced sprawl over the 20th century, but since 2000 these trends have rebounded, shifting back toward historical design patterns.
This study measures the entropy (or disordered-ness) of street bearings in each street network, along with each city’s typical street segment length, average circuity, average node degree, and the network’s proportions of four-way intersections and dead-ends. It also develops a new indicator of orientation-order that quantifies how a city’s street network follows the geometric ordering logic of a single grid. These indicators, taken in concert, reveal the extent and nuance of the grid.
Could that delicate and complex instrument that lies in the human breast ever really produce a reading that was absolutely clear and truthful, like a clock’s hands pointing to numbers on its dial?
I could not know that even then the little light was being drawn irresistibly into the great soundless whirl of darkness and that I was watching a light that was destined soon to blink out and disappear.
If you count off a circle of beads, you never reach an end. At what point, and with what feelings, would his fingers cease to move those beads? This may be a silly question, but it haunts me.