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A city block, residential block, urban block, or simply block is a central element of urban planning and urban design. In a city with a grid system, the block is the smallest group of buildings that is surrounded by streets. City blocks are the space for buildings within the street pattern of a city, and form the basic unit of a city's urban ...
The dimensions of the blocks are given by the aforementioned distances between the longitudinal axes of the streets and the same width of these roads, so that by establishing a standard width of 20 meters, the blocks are formed by quadrilaterals of 113.3 meters, their vertices truncated in the form of a chamfer of 15 meters, which gives a block ...
Block sizes and street length In a numbered grid system, adding an extra street can cause confusion. Street width, or right of way (ROW), influences the amount of land that is devoted to streets, which becomes unavailable for development and therefore represents an opportunity cost. The wider the street, the higher the opportunity cost.
In most US cities, a city block is between 1 ⁄ 16 and 1 ⁄ 8 mi (100 and 200 m). In Manhattan, the measurement "block" usually refers to a north–south block, which is 1 ⁄ 20 mi (80 m). Sometimes people living in places (like Manhattan) with a regularly spaced street grid will speak of long blocks and short blocks.
Floor area ratio (FAR) is the ratio of a building's total floor area (gross floor area) to the size of the piece of land upon which it is built. It is often used as one of the regulations in city planning along with the building-to-land ratio. [1] The terms can also refer to limits imposed on such a ratio through zoning.
A measure of 100 by 100 varas (Spanish) is almost 7000 square meters, and is known traditionally throughout Spain and Latin America as a manzana (i.e., a "city block"). As well, lumber is still measured in Costa Rica using a system based on 4 vara, or 11 feet, for both round and square wood.
Taxicab geometry or Manhattan geometry is geometry where the familiar Euclidean distance is ignored, and the distance between two points is instead defined to be the sum of the absolute differences of their respective Cartesian coordinates, a distance function (or metric) called the taxicab distance, Manhattan distance, or city block distance.
The neighbourhood unit was conceived of as a comprehensive physical planning tool, to be utilised for designing self-contained residential neighbourhoods which promoted a community centric lifestyle, away from the "noise of the trains, and out of sight of the smoke and ugliness of industrial plants" emblematic of an industrialising New York City in the early 1900s.