page_title: Grid plan
section_title: Europe and its colonies (12th-17th centuries)
hierarchical_section_title: Grid plan / History / Europe and its colonies (12th-17th centuries)
caption_attribution_description: English: Bastide (town) - map Gascon Français&#160;: Bastide - schéma modèle Gascon
context_page_description: The grid plan, grid street plan, or gridiron plan is a type of city plan in which streets run at right angles to each other, forming a grid. The infrastructure cost for regular grid patterns is generally higher than for patterns with discontinuous streets.
  Costs for streets depend largely on four variables: street width, street length, block width and pavement width. Two inherent characteristics of the grid plan, frequent intersections and orthogonal geometry, facilitate pedestrian movement. The geometry helps with orientation and wayfinding and its frequent intersections with the choice and directness of route to desired destinations.
  In ancient Rome, the grid plan method of land measurement was called centuriation. The grid plan dates from antiquity and originated in multiple cultures; some of the earliest planned cities were built using grid plans.
context_section_description: New European towns were planned using grids beginning in the 12th century, most prodigiously in the bastides of southern France that were built during the 13th and 14th centuries. Medieval European new towns using grid plans were widespread, ranging from Wales to the Florentine region. Many were built on ancient grids originally established as Roman colonial outposts. In the British Isles, the planned new town system involving a grid street layout was part of the system of burgage.
  The Roman model was also used in Spanish settlements during the Reconquista of Ferdinand and Isabella. It was subsequently applied in the new cities established during the Spanish colonization of the Americas, after the founding of San Cristóbal de La Laguna (Canary Islands) in 1496. In 1573, King Phillip II of Spain compiled the Laws of the Indies to guide the construction and administration of colonial communities. The Laws specified a square or rectangular central plaza with eight principal streets running from the plaza's corners. Hundreds of grid-plan communities throughout the Americas were established according to this pattern, echoing the practices of earlier Indian civilizations.
  The baroque capital city of Malta, Valletta, dating back to the 16th Century, was built following a rigid grid plan of uniformly designed houses, dotted with palaces, churches and squares.
  The grid plan became popular with the start of the Renaissance in Northern Europe. In 1606, the newly founded city of Mannheim in Germany was the first Renaissance city laid out on the grid plan. Later came the New Town in Edinburgh and almost the entire city centre of Glasgow, and many planned communities and cities in Australia, Canada and the United States.
  Derry, constructed in 1613–1618, was the first planned city in Ireland. The central diamond within a walled city with four gates was considered a good design for defence. The grid pattern was widely copied in the colonies of British North America.
caption: Bastide schema in Gascony
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