20 cities, as many framings
Not every city gives the same result as a poster. A strict grid, a meandering river, and a belt of canals call for different framing and do not take the same themes. Here are 20 cities annotated one by one, with the framing and theme that suit each.
Paris
France
Paris has two structures layered on top of each other, and both read well as linework: the Seine, cutting the city east to west in a wide curve, and the Haussmann avenues radiating from circular squares.
Lyon
France
Lyon is one of the few large cities whose shape comes from two rivers rather than one.
Marseille
France
The coast decides everything: it occupies the left or bottom edge of the poster depending on orientation, and the city unfolds against it.
Bordeaux
France
The Garonne traces a curve in front of Bordeaux so regular that it gave the city its nickname, the port of the Moon.
Amsterdam
Netherlands
Few cities have a shape this immediately recognisable.
New York
United States
Manhattan is the exact inverse of Paris: a strict grid, no stars, no radial avenues, whose interest comes precisely from the three things that break it.
London
United Kingdom
The Thames does not cross London in a line: it makes several tight loops, including the Isle of Dogs, nearly closed on itself.
Lisboa
Portugal
Lisbon has a rare property: two urban logics sit within a few hundred metres of each other.
Barcelona
Spain
The Eixample is not an ordinary grid: every intersection is cut on the diagonal, which on the map produces a texture of repeated octagons rather than squares.
Tokyo
Japan
Tokyo is the city on this list that demands the most attention to framing, precisely because it has no dominant structure: no grid, no radial stars, a very fine and very dense network.
Toulouse
France
Toulouse has neither a grid nor a main axis: its streets run in every direction from the Capitole, which gives its map the texture of a fingerprint.
Nantes
France
In Nantes the Loire splits into two arms around the Île de Nantes, nearly five kilometres long: on the map it draws a long spindle set in the middle of the river, a shape recognised at once.
Lille
France
Lille has a shape no other major French city shows as clearly: Vauban's citadel, a seventeenth-century star-shaped pentagon surrounded by moats and set in the Bois de Boulogne park.
Strasbourg
France
Strasbourg's historic centre is an island: the Grande Île, held between the Ill to the south and the Fossé du Faux-Rempart to the north.
Nice
France
Nice is a seaside city in the most graphic sense: the Baie des Anges draws a long, regular curve underlined by the Promenade des Anglais, and the sea fills the whole bottom of the poster.
Annecy
France
Annecy reads first through its lake: the city sits on its northern shore, and the water fills the whole south-east of the map in one large smooth shape that contrasts with the street network.
Rome
Italy
Rome layers more than two thousand years of street plans, and the map shows it: at the heart, the Campus Martius is a tangle of lanes with no dominant direction, tucked into a bend of the Tiber.
Venice
Italy
Venice is the only city whose map reads first through water: the lagoon surrounds everything, and the Grand Canal crosses the city in a reversed S almost four kilometres long.
Chicago
United States
Chicago is almost the opposite of an old city: a grid set on the cardinal points, regular for miles, cut only by a few diagonal avenues older than the grid itself.
Kyoto
Japan
Kyoto was founded in 794 as Heian-kyō, modelled on the Chinese capital Chang'an: a north-south grid the city has kept to this day.
How ordered are their streets?
Each page also gives the orientation of the city's streets, measured in our study of 64 cities: a grid as in Chicago, or streets in every direction as in Toulouse.
Read the street orientation studyThis list is deliberately short. The generator covers more than 50,000 cities: every one of them can be created in the editor, but only those with something particular to show get a page here.
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