Building Our Own Block City
Grab a pile of wooden blocks and dump them on the rug. In just ten minutes, you can build a whole tiny city — with houses, a road, a store, and even a park with a block-tower tree. That's exactly what city planners do, except their blocks are real buildings and their rug is an entire town!
What You'll Learn
- What a city needs to work well for everyone - Why roads connect the different parts of a city - How to group buildings into neighborhoods - Why parks and open space matter just as much as buildings
What Does Every City Need?
Every city, big or small, needs four main things: places to live (houses and apartments), places to work or shop (stores and offices), places to get around (roads, sidewalks, bridges), and places to play and rest (parks and playgrounds). A city planner's job is to decide where each of these goes so people don't have far to travel and everything fits together.
Roads Connect Everything
Imagine your block city has houses on one side of the rug and a pretend grocery store on the other side, but no road between them. Nobody could get their food! Roads are like the strings that tie a city together. Real city planners draw roads first, almost like a spiderweb, before they decide where any buildings will go.
Build three houses in a row. Now build one store far away. Use a long block or a strip of tape as the 'road' connecting them. Notice how much longer the road needs to be if the store is far from the houses!
Neighborhoods: Grouping Things Together
Cities are usually split into neighborhoods — a cluster of houses near each other, a cluster of shops near each other, sometimes a cluster of schools and playgrounds. When similar buildings sit close together, it's easier to find what you need and easier for city workers to bring water, electricity, and trash trucks to everyone at once.
Parks Are Not Empty Space
A city with only buildings and roads gets crowded and hot. Parks give people (and trees, and birds) a place to breathe. In your block city, leave at least one open square of rug empty — that's your park. Real cities like New York planned Central Park on purpose, right in the middle of tall buildings, so everyone nearby could reach it.
Why do city planners usually draw the roads before placing the buildings?
What is a neighborhood?
Match each city part to what it's mainly used for.
Terms
Definitions
Drag terms onto their definitions, or click a term then click a definition to match.
Design Your Block City
Using blocks, LEGO, or even cut paper squares, build a mini city with: at least 3 houses, 1 store, 1 park, and roads connecting all of them. Take a photo or draw a map of your finished city and label each part (houses, store, road, park).
The city of Brasília, the capital of Brazil, was designed from scratch on empty land in the 1950s — planners drew the entire city, roads and all, before a single building was built!
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