Breaking down cities

NPR's Robert Krulwich had a really cool post up the other day, featuring the work of French artist Armelle Caron. Caron's project was to take overhead maps of cities (and their blocks), then to rearrange and categorize the chunks of land that were carved out by the roads and avenues in that city.

New York, then, starts like this:

And ends up like this:

Pretty boring, really, but that's not at all surprising to anyone who's been to New York and is familiar with its cookie-cutter grid system.

There are some more interesting ones over in Europe, in cities that have been around longer and therefore are a little less centrally-planned.

This here is Paris (also surprisingly boring):

And this is Berlin:

And this little jigsaw puzzle of insanity is Istanbul:

As Krulwich pointed out, I can't imagine what it's like to walk around that city. What would your hometown look like?

[NPR]