Grid street pattern

The grid plan, grid street plan, or gridiron plan is a type of city plan in which streets run at right angles to each other, forming a . The infrastructure cost for regular grid patterns is generally higher than for patterns with discontinuous streets.

Costs for streets depend largely on four variables: street width, street length, block width and pavement width. Two inherent characteristics of the grid plan, frequent intersections and orthogonal geometry, assist pedestrian movement. The geometry helps with orientation and wayfinding and its frequent intersections with the choice and directness of route to desired destinations.

In ancient Rome, the grid plan method of land measurement was called centuriation. The grid plan dates from antiquity and originated in multiple cultures; some of the earliest planned cities were built using grid plans.

By 2600 BC, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, major cities of the Indus Valley Civilization (in what is now Pakistan), were built with blocks divided by a grid of straight streets, running north-south and east-west. Each block was subdivided by small lanes. The cities and monasteries of Gandhara (e.g. Sirkap and Taxila), dating from the 1st millennium BC to the 11th century AD, also had grid-based designs.Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan since 1959, was also founded on the grid-plan of the nearby ruined city of Sirkap.

A workers' village (2570-2500 BC) at Giza, Egypt, housed a rotating labor force and was laid out in blocks of long galleries separated by streets in a formal grid. Many pyramid-cult cities used a common orientation: a north-south axis from the royal palace and an east-west axis from the temple, meeting at a central plaza where King and God merged and crossed.

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