Assignment 4 - Analyzing Your City

Assignment 4 --  Design Choices and Constraints in Your City

In this assignment you will analyze a city you know well – maybe the one you grew up in or live now… just pick one.

Here is some background and framing information to get you in the right mindset:

• Cities contain many different types of organizing systems that together enable the people who live, work, or visit there to do so safely and efficiently.   Many cities are divided into parts or “zoned”  for different purposes.  There are housing areas,  recreational areas like parks,  commercial areas for shopping, offices, factories, and warehouses, and governmental areas where the people who run the city work.
• Many big cities are sub-divided into smaller regions to make government functions more closely tied to people.  These smaller regions are typically called boroughs, districts, wards, or precincts.  But no matter how a city is “officially” organized,  over time cities organize themselves  into neighborhoods that differ in the typical ages, wealth, and lifestyles of the people who live in them.   Neighborhood boundaries are not official ones, but because neighborhood names are commonly used by people to identify nice and safe (or not nice and not safe) places to live and go out, after you’ve lived somewhere for a while you will be familiar with neighborhood names.
• Some cities are very old, like Rome Italy, which was first settled about 2800 years ago.  The map of Rome reveals  a very irregular pattern of streets that evolved as the city grew across the river that snakes through the city.   Other cities, even some very old ones, were planned very carefully, with streets organized in a very regular pattern.  Just as latitude and longitude coordinates make it easy to locate any place on earth, a “GRID” city plan imposes a very regular system of streets (like that of Salt Lake City here).

But more generally, place and street names are history books: they encode the history of settlement, ethnography, immigration, government, or prevailing ideology.   They tell us about the cultural and social values of the city over time.   Which people were honored by having streets named after them?  Were they scientists, artists, military heroes,  politicians, or religious leaders?   Were they mostly men or mostly women?  Were they honored for personal achievements (making an important invention,  setting a world record in sports), or were they honored for their entire life’s work?

AND NOW FOR THE ASSIGNMENT..  There are two parts.  Your answers to each numbered question can be just a sentence or two.

Make The Title of Your Assignment “Analyzing <CITY NAME>”

Part 1 - A “Wide Angle” Analysis Of Your City

 Use Google Maps or any other map you like and find the map that has your town or city in the center.

1. Is the city organized to create separate places or areas for housing, recreation, shopping, schools, government, or other distinct purposes?
2. Do any of these areas have neighborhood names? 
3. Are the boundaries or organization of the city affected by geographical features like mountains, rivers, lakes, or deserts?
4. Are the boundaries or organization of the city affected by constructed features like highways, bridges, or canals?

Part 2  - A “Zoom In” Analysis Of Your City

 Zoom in on the map to the downtown or center of the city to a zoom level where you can see the names of streets

1. Is the city plan irregular like that of Rome, or more regular like that of Salt Lake City?
2. Are streets organized using letters or numbers?  (Avenue A, B, C…  1st, 2nd, 3rd Street)
3. Do some streets have names based on landmarks?  (Wall Street, Canal Street, Mission Street)
4. Are some streets named after presidents or other famous people?
5. Are there any other naming patterns for streets?  (in Washington DC, many of the streets are named after states — the White House is on Pennsylvania Avenue)