We found a cool article on city structures by Bricoleurbanism, a Canadian blog which focuses on the city, the landscape and the fields that manipulate them from the perspective of urban design and landscape architecture.

The article refers to a publication by the Star, a Canadian newspaper, called ‘Beyond Density’. This publication deals with on the efforts of a Canadian city called Mississauga to create a more vibrant and pedestrian-friendly downtown. To prove the city’s problem – the large scale of the block patterns – the article includes urban forms or fabric drawings of 9 cities in order to compare the scales of the fabric of the street network.

These are the different city structures:

MIssissauga: “Long blocks and virtually empty sidewalks”                    Barcelona: “La Ramblas is the main north-south promenade”

Copenhagen: “City features a car-free zone called the Stroget”          London: “The Mayfair and Soho districts south of Oxford St”

New York: “Midtown Manhattan south of Central Park”                        Paris: “Streets were designed by Georges-Eugne Haussmann”

Rome: “East of the Tiber River bend that points to the Vatican”         San Francisco: “Market St splits the central city into two grids”

Toronto: “Between Queen and College Sts east of Bathurst”

More than anything, the comparisons expose the natural problems of scale in trying to evolve any suburban, car-oriented area into a more pedestrian-oriented centre. The traditional response in suburbia has been to internalize pedestrian areas (for instance in form of the mall), like Square One (a shopping mall home to the largest Walmart in the world) being a particularly powerful example. The size of Square One’s block makes a very interesting comparison with Copenhagen’s city centre in which a series of streets and spaces have been linked together and pedestrianized. In size or length of pedestrian space, the two might even be close, but in overall character and degree of integration into the urban fabric (particularly important for pedestrians) they are from wholly different worlds and you can easily trace much of these differences to the scale of the street fabric.

The other valuable insight from such comparisons is that there really is no perfect form of street fabric. Different kinds of networks and patterns are capable of producing amazing places and being friendly for pedestrians as long as their fabric allows frequent and comprehensive linkages. There simply seems to be an upper scale beyond which all hope of efficient (and therefore popular) pedestrian circulation is gone.

Pictures of block structures of big cities © TheStar.com

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