Me and Tylertoon came up with this a few weeks ago as a new way to lay out residential plots in an organized and fashionable manner.

http://imgur.com/iJEIim3

The layout is called a berg. As can be seen in the image, the basic idea is to have a small neighborhood coming off the main road built around a central open plot. All the houses face in towards the open plot.

The most immediate advantage to the berg is that it looks much nicer than a bunch of houses built along a road. The central plot can also be used functionally as a garden or small farm.

The berg layout is also quite functional for organizational purposes. Instead of relying on street names to find houses, each berg can be named and houses assigned numbers in it. So it would a lot easier to find a house in a berg than on a street.