- 02 Jan, 2026 *
Chicago is a city on a grid. Noah Nathan’s stimulating “Do Grids Demobilize?” (AJPS) suggests this should be bad for social interaction, and thus collective action. Gridded streets, he argues, provide more exits from the neighborhood, such that any two residents are less likely to bump into each other. And gridded neighborhoods, which are planned neighborhoods, are more segregated by use, providing fewer opportunities for serendipitous encounters at the corner shop.
I have never been to Accra, where Noah’s study is situated, but his findings fit my image of the alternately ordered and disordered streets of a city …
- 02 Jan, 2026 *
Chicago is a city on a grid. Noah Nathan’s stimulating “Do Grids Demobilize?” (AJPS) suggests this should be bad for social interaction, and thus collective action. Gridded streets, he argues, provide more exits from the neighborhood, such that any two residents are less likely to bump into each other. And gridded neighborhoods, which are planned neighborhoods, are more segregated by use, providing fewer opportunities for serendipitous encounters at the corner shop.
I have never been to Accra, where Noah’s study is situated, but his findings fit my image of the alternately ordered and disordered streets of a city in the developing world. But the paper’s conclusions ring false as I consider my own highly gridded neighborhood of Hyde Park, which—I have discovered, since we got a dog—is teeming with chance encounters. Why not?
First, although there are many non-intersecting paths from residential Hyde Park to the university campus, not all paths are created equal. Among routes of equal length, it is natural to choose the one that passes by the commercial activity of 57th Street. The beauty of the grid is that one can choose where to walk without sacrificing time to destination.
Second, the width of streets matters a great deal. Downtown Chicago was planned in conformity with the length of a surveyor’s chain: 66 feet from one sidewalk to the other. When I moved to the South Loop from Paris, the streets seemed forbiddingly wide. Hyde Park’s grid is narrower, such that I can easily pass to the opposite sidewalk if my dog sees a potential playmate. I wonder if Accra’s gridded streets are wider than its ungridded ones.
Finally, the natural counterfactual for the city of Chicago is not a medieval warren but a garden suburb with curving roads and highly segregated uses. These were, Jane Jacobs noted, places for those who “did not mind spending [their lives] among others with no plans of their own.” Griddedness, in other words, is comparatively associated with isolation only where planned suburbs are absent.