There is no great city in the world that isn’t made up of a highly connected network of streets. In fact this is the first thing that all great cities have in common: New York, London, Sydney, San Francisco, Chicago, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Beirut, Istanbul and on and on. In every case, whether planned (Philadelphia, for example) or more randomly grown (Paris, for example, Haussmann notwithstanding) the first element of the city is the street network.

It all begins with an idea.

2021 marks an important anniversary for Atlanta. It’s been two hundred years since the 1821 Treaty of Indian Springs in which the Creek Nation ceded the territory that would become the capital city we know today. You could think of this year as the bicentennial of Terminus or Marthasville or metro Atlanta – the entire landscape where I spend most of my days.

The grid has been used continuously throughout the world as a development pattern since Hippodamus first used it in Piraeus, Greece, in the 5th century BC. A lot happened over the next 2,000 years after that, but in 1682 William Penn used the grid as the physical foundation for Philadelphia. With that, the grid began its new life in the new America.