<p>Due to significant differences in scale between individual streets and the whole urban area, modeling urban areas poses challenges and requires special considerations. This paper presents an experiment using simplified urban areas represented by square blocks to highlight the influence of street width and building obstruction on flood progression. Additionally, the two-dimensional (2D) surface flood model (the UOL model) and the porosity hydrodynamic model (the MLIT model) are employed to simulate the flooding within building areas, with experimental results serving as validation and evaluation benchmarks for both modeling approaches. The main findings of this study are as follows: (1) Building layouts significantly affect flood progression. In aligned layouts, wider streets result in smaller head losses, whereas rotated layouts lead to significant fluctuations in water depth due to increased flow resistance. In staggered layouts, there is a more significant increase in water depth at locations where buildings staggered. (2) The UOL model was able to effectively simulate flood inundation in most cases, but failed to fully reproduce the experimental results due to the significant influence of surface tension of physical model materials in smaller-scale experiments. (3) The MLIT model was also able to effectively simulate flood inundation in certain cases, but its fixed drag coefficient recommendation makes it inadequate to address the challenges posed by variations in building layout. Additionally, it is necessary to study the applicability of the models in real-scale scenarios, as flow behavior in actual-scale urban areas may differ from the idealized urban areas observed in the models.</p>