Cities are shapeless, changing realities that expand unpredictably, driven by socio-urban and socio-economic trends. But can we anticipate these growth trends? Here is a tool that allows users to analyze road networks and calculate the percentage of streets oriented in any given direction relative to the north.
The tool was created by urban researcher Geoff Boeing, who, along with students and researchers at UC Berkeley, developed a way to visualize the consistency of any city's urban fabric—what he calls “urban logic.”
This free-access tool uses a classic geographic technique: the “polar chart,” creating a polar histogram—similar to a “wind rose”—where the direction of each bar represents the dominant orientation of the streets relative to conventional cardinal directions (North, South, East, and West), and its length represents how frequently streets are oriented in that specific direction.
By clearly illustrating the manner and direction of urban growth, this tool becomes a highly valuable resource for urban planning studies. Understanding which direction cities are expanding helps researchers identify the underlying reasons behind this growth to address potential issues or, if they are beneficial, leverage them to support further development in that direction.
In addition to analyzing our own cities, this tool allows us to study and compare other major global hubs. This makes it possible to study how similar cities with comparable social and economic profiles grow in entirely different ways, demonstrating that urban expansion is not shaped solely by intrinsic local realities.
Explore here.
This article was written by Borja Fernández. The translation is powered by AI.
