Humanity from Above

Last week, my brother sent me a link to a Boston.com feature that's actually not about Boston at all, but instead is about Florida. It's no secret that Florida real estate is a little bit crazy - since the '60s, it's been the home of massive planned development efforts, many of which never actually made it to completion.

As a result, Florida looks pretty crazy from above. If you can manage to forget about all of the waste and the sheer weirdness of living in an overly-planned environment, it even looks sort of beautiful, in a graphic sort of way:

All of the maps above come from Google maps, so for a bit of perspective, I Google mapped the neighborhood where I grew up, along with the neighborhood next door. I think it's from approximately the same height:

There's planning there, obviously, but there's a major difference: my neighborhood, which was built in the 1940s and '50s, was developed over time and built to suit the geography of the land, instead of flattening the land to accommodate the building. Both Ben Oaks, where I grew up, and Pointfield Landing (next door) are built on hills, with streets circling the top of the hill. They're also both built to make the most of the waterfront, with streets following the shore. And they were obviously not built in an effort to cram in as many houses as possible.

I'm partial to the Ben Oaks version of planning, of course, and it's making it hard for me to see any benefits to the Florida-style approach. Are there any?