system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I remember reading somewhere that major cities that experienced catastrophic fires (ones that burned down the majority of the city) converted to gridded road systems, whereas those that had no major fires didn't. Is there any truth to this statement?
gpt
Not really any truth to this statement. London is the perfect example to demonstrate this. London burned completely to the ground in 1666, but yet the road layout in the center of the city is over a thousand years old. In the days after the fire there were lots of plans to completely redo the road system, and the entire layout of the city. The plans still exist in a museum in the city. All these plans were dropped. Why? For two main reasons: Firstly, to redraw the entire map was going to cause a legal nightmare. Buildings may have been burned down, but people still owned all the land, and it was not possible to simply build a new road through someones land. Even in London centuries ago, the state didn't have the power to arbitrarily redraw maps  Secondly: the city needed to get back to business and life as normal, and the quickest way of doing so was to simply rebuild all the houses/businesses in the same places as before. Bakers etc. simply had their shop rebuilt and opened selling bread again a few weeks later.  

In the case of London, all that the officials achieved was a slight change to the building codes stating how wide roads had to be. The roads were made a little wider.