Decoding the urban grid: or why cities are neither trees nor perfect grids

In a previous paper (Figueiredo and Amorim, 2005), we introduced the continuity lines, a compressed description that encapsulates topological and geometrical properties of urban grids. In this paper, we applied this technique to a large database of maps that included cities of 22 countries. We explore how this representation encodes into networks universal features of urban grids and, at the same time, retrieves differences that reflect classes of cities. Then, we propose an emergent taxonomy for urban grids