City layouts, or urban plans, are the way streets, buildings, and public spaces are organized in a city. They’re shaped by history, geography, culture, and purpose. There’s no one-size-fits-all, but a few patterns stand out. See the most interesting ones in satellite images.
Barcelona (Spain)
Eixample is a district of Barcelona, planned in the mid-19th century by engineer Ildefons Cerdà. He flipped the script on urban design. Instead of a standard grid, he created a pattern of square blocks with chamfered corners—each corner sliced off at a 45-degree angle. This gives the layout a distinctive look from above, like a quilt of octagons. The idea? Better airflow, sunlight, and visibility at intersections. Cerdà was obsessed with health and equality—wide streets (20-30 meters), courtyards inside blocks for green space, and a uniform grid to avoid rich-poor divides. It’s 133 blocks per side, stretching from the old city to the foothills.
The chamfers weren’t just aesthetic. They were practical—horse carriages (and later cars) could turn easier, and the angled corners became spots for cafés and socializing. Avenues like Passeig de Gràcia cut through diagonally, adding a radial flair and linking key spots like Gaudí’s wild buildings (Casa Batlló, La Pedrera).
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La Plata (Argentina)
La Plata’s city layout is a textbook example of deliberate urban planning, designed from scratch in the late 19th century. Founded in 1882 by Governor Dardo Rocha after Buenos Aires was federalized, it was meant to be the new capital of Buenos Aires Province. Urban planner Pedro Benoit crafted its distinctive design, which blends a strict grid pattern with a network of diagonal avenues. This creates a star-like symmetry when viewed from above, often praised for its geometric precision.
The core layout is a perfect square, roughly 5 kilometers by 5 kilometers, with numbered streets (no names, just numbers like Calle 1 or Avenida 51) forming a grid. Every six blocks, there’s a plaza or park—23 in total originally, including the massive Paseo del Bosque, a forested park with a zoo and observatory. The diagonals—wide avenues like Diagonal 80 or 74—cut through at 45-degree angles, connecting key points like plazas and public buildings. Benoit’s plan drew from Renaissance ideals of symmetry and order, but also nodded to higienist ideas of the time: wide streets (some up to 30 meters), abundant trees (lindens, jacarandas), and open spaces to promote airflow and health.
Unlike Barcelona’s chamfered Eixample, which adapted an existing city, La Plata was a blank slate, built to project progress and unity. It won a gold medal at the 1889 Paris Exposition for its forward-thinking design. Today, it’s green, student-filled (thanks to the National University), and livable, though some argue its perfection feels sterile compared to organic cities.
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Round Gardens (Denmark)
On the outskirts of Copenhagen lies Brøndby Garden City, also known as Circle City, characterized by the 284 allotments divided into 12 rotundas. Read more
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Pearl-Qatar (Doha, Qatar)
The Pearl-Qatar is a man-made island off Doha’s West Bay, covering nearly 4 million square meters (about 1.5 square miles). Started in 2004 by United Development Company (UDC), it’s built on reclaimed land from a former pearl-diving site—hence the name, nodding to Qatar’s pearl-trading past. Its layout isn’t a classic grid like Manhattan or a radial star like La Plata; it’s a modular, precinct-based design, strung along a curved shoreline like a necklace, with 32 kilometers of new coastline.
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New York – Brooklyn
The grid layout in New York – Brooklyn. Streets run straight, intersecting at right angles, forming blocks. It’s simple, efficient, and easy to navigate.
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Sun City (Arizona, USA)
Sun City, Arizona, has a city layout that’s a bit of an oddball compared to the sprawling grids or organic tangles of other places. It was purpose-built as a retirement community, dreamed up by developer Del Webb and opened on January 1, 1960. Unlike cities that grow haphazardly over centuries, Sun City was planned from the ground up to cater to active seniors, and its design reflects that.
The layout is defined by a series of concentric circles and looping streets, a stark contrast to the rectangular grids of nearby Phoenix or even Manhattan’s rigid lines.
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Venice (Italy)
Venice’s city layout is a glorious mess, born from water and defiance. It’s not a city in the usual sense—more like 118 small islands stitched together by canals and bridges in a lagoon off the Adriatic Sea. No grids, no circles, no straight lines worth mentioning. It’s an organic labyrinth, shaped by centuries of adapting to mudflats, tides, and trade.
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Edku (Egypt)
Edku in Egypt has a city layout that’s less about grand planning and more about organic growth tied to its unique geography. It sits in the Beheira Governorate, east of Alexandria and west of Rosetta, perched on a sandy strip between the Mediterranean Sea and Lake Idku in the northwestern Nile Delta. This isn’t a city like La Plata or Sun City, built from scratch with a clear blueprint—Edku’s form evolved over centuries, shaped by its lagoon-and-coast setting and its history stretching back to Pharaonic times.
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Neza (Nezahualcóyotl, Mexico)
Neza’s city layout is a gritty, practical take on the grid system, born from necessity rather than grand design. It sits just east of Mexico City in the State of Mexico, sprawled across the drained bed of Lake Texcoco. Unlike the planned elegance of La Plata or the colonial overlay of Mexico City, Neza’s grid emerged from a chaotic rush of informal settlement starting in the mid-20th century.
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Madinat al-‘Ashir min Ramadan (Egypt)
Madinat al-‘Ashir min Ramadan, located in the Sharqia Governorate about 46 kilometers northeast of Cairo, is a modern, purpose-built city with a highly structured layout. Unlike organic cities like Venice or Edku, it was designed from scratch starting in 1977 under President Anwar Sadat’s initiative to decongest Cairo by creating satellite cities. Its name commemorates the start of the Yom Kippur War on the 10th of Ramadan, 1393 AH (October 6, 1973).
The layout is a classic rectangular grid, optimized for industry and efficiency. Wide, straight streets—some up to 30-40 meters across—run north-south and east-west, forming uniform blocks. It’s split into numbered residential “neighborhoods” (hayy, like Hayy 1, Hayy 2) and industrial zones, with clear separation between living and working areas. The grid’s simplicity mirrors Manhattan’s or Nezahualcóyotl’s, but it’s flatter and more utilitarian—no chamfers like Barcelona or diagonals like La Plata. Major roads, like the Cairo-Ismailia Desert Highway running nearby, connect it to the capital and ports (Port Said, Suez), making logistics a priority.
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