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.
While commercial websites display more and more agressive messages, target and track their users, the indie web respects the individuals, their intelligence and their privacy; it’s an open forum for thoughts and debate. While purely commercial websites turn into information and entertainment magazines, while tycoons of media, telecom, computing and military agencies fight for the control of the Internet, the indie web offers a free vision of the world, bypasses the economic censorship of news, its confusion with advertising and infommercial, its reduction to a dazing and manipulating entertainment.