[throwaway283719]

I take slight issue with this quotation -

> Though the idea of a street grid seems perfectly ordinary to city-dwellers today, it was unusual at the time. Most great cities in Mesopotamia, for example, had curving streets and a more organic-looking layout.

Maybe a street grid seems ordinary if you live in a large city in the US, but most European cities don't have gridded streets (and I don't think it's the norm in many other places in the world either).

[davidw]

> most European cities don't have gridded streets

The Romans built towns on a grid too. You can see that in the very center of many Italian towns, like the one I live in:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Padua,+Italy/@45.4083831,1...

No, it's not a perfect grid any more, but it's still visible - not bad for a couple of thousand years.

[allendoerfer]

Except when some monarch built one for fun.

Like Mannheim [0]. Can't get more gridded than that.

[0]: https://encrypted.google.com/maps/place/Mannheim,+Deutschlan...

[twic]

Meanwhile, in Karlsruhe:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Karlsruhe,+Germany/@49.0...