City block

Uncommon card · No. 197053

In urban planning and urban design, a city block, residential block, urban block, houseblock, or simply 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 fabric. City blocks may be subdivided into any number of smaller land lots, usually in private ownership, though in some cases, it may be other forms of tenure. City blocks are usually built-up to varying degrees and thus form the physical containers, or "streetwalls," of public spaces. Most cities are composed of a greater or lesser variety of sizes and shapes of an urban block. For example, many pre-industrial cores of cities in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East tend to have irregularly shaped street patterns and urban blocks, while cities based on grids have much more regular arrangements. By extension, the word "block" is an important informal unit of length equal to the distance between two streets...

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