Geometry of Urban Order

Urban street networks are modeled as spatial graphs whose geometry reflects planning, history, and physical constraints. Global orientation measures describe the overall order of a city but do not reveal how street directions form coherent neighborhoods. Here we introduce bearings communities—spatially connected domains whose streets share a common orientation—and analyze them using concepts from the physics of polycrystalline materials. Across $1025$ large cities worldwide, these domains are almost perfectly ordered: their mean coherence is $0.964$ and varies by only $1.4\mathrm{\%}$ from one city to the next, far above the value expected for randomly oriented streets. Every city is therefore a mosaic of well-ordered orientational grains, differing only in their number, size, and mutual alignment. Because the grains are equally regular everywhere, a city’s global order is set mainly by how many of them it averages over: a city appears ordered because it is built from a few large grains, not because its fabric is locally more regular. A null model in which grain orientations are randomized confirms this grain-counting mechanism. Finally, the interface fraction $\gamma$ measures how strongly domains interlock, yielding a morphology diagram that organizes cities continuously between grid-like, polycrystalline, and fragmented limits.