Street grid

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 . 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 and Northwestern India), 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.

Hammurabi king of the Babylonian Empire in the 17th century BC, ordered the rebuilding of Babylon: constructing and restoring temples, city walls, public buildings, and irrigation canals. The streets of Babylon were wide and straight, intersected approximately at right angles, and were paved with bricks and bitumen.

The tradition of grid plans is continuous in China from the 15th century BC onward in the traditional urban planning of various ancient Chinese states. Guidelines put into written form in the Kaogongji during the Spring and Autumn period (770-476 BC) stated: "a capital city should be square on plan. Three gates on each side of the perimeter lead into the nine main streets that crisscross the city and define its grid-pattern. And for its layout the city should have the Royal Court situated in the south, the Marketplace in the north, the Imperial Ancestral Temple in the east and the Altar to the Gods of Land and Grain in the west."

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