The History of Settlements in Hungary

Partly inspired by the New York Times' popular Map of Every Building in America the Atlo data visualization team decided to undertake a detailed examination of the street patterns of urban settlements in Hungary. In Roads, Buildings, Networks Alto looks at the different types of settlement morphology and the history of urban growth and planning in the country.

Roads, Buildings, Networks includes an interactive map which shows only the outlines of building footprints and roads. The data for this map comes from OpenStreetMap. Unfortunately the building footprint data for Hungary on OSM can be a little patchy, however the Atlo map does provide an interesting view of the street patterns of Hungary's urban settlements.

Accompanying the interactive map is a very detailed explanation of how terrain, hydrography, history and other factors have helped shape Hungary's different urban environments. Through this exploration of settlement morphology Atlo identifies distinct forms. These include the spherical street patterns of the historic mining towns and the regular chessboard-like street patterns which resulted from the urban planning which began in the 17th century,