Centrality Measures in Spatial Networks of Urban Streets

Street networks may be planned according to clear organizing principles or they may evolve organically through accretion, but their configurations and orientations help define a city's spatial logic and order. Measures of entropy reveal a city's streets' order and disorder. Past studies have explored individual cases of orientation and entropy, but little is known about broader patterns and trends worldwide. This study examines street network orientation, configuration, and e...

Relying on random and purposive moving agents, we simulated human movement in large street networks. We found that aggregate flow, assigned to individual streets, is mainly shaped by the underlying street structure, and that human moving behavior (either random or purposive) has little effect on the aggregate flow. This finding implies that given a street network, the movement patterns generated by purposive walkers (mostly human beings) and by random walkers are the same. Ba...

Urban road networks are typical complex systems, which are crucial to our society and economy. In this study, topological characteristics of a number of urban road networks based on purely physical roads rather than routes of vehicles or buses are investigated in order to discover underlying unique structural features, particularly compared to other types of transport networks. Based on these topological indices, correlations between topological indices and small-worldness of...

Cities consist of infrastructure that enables transportation, which can be considered as topology in abstract terms. Once cities are physically organized in terms of infrastructure, people interact with each other to form the values, which can be regarded as the meta-information of the cities. The topology and meta-information coevolve together as the cities are developed. In this study, we investigate the relationship between the topology and meta-information for a street ne...

A city is not a tree but a semi-lattice. To use a perhaps more familiar term, a city is a complex network. The complex network constitutes a unique topological perspective on cities and enables us to better understand the kind of problem a city is. The topological perspective differentiates it from the perspectives of Euclidean geometry and Gaussian statistics that deal with essentially regular shapes and more or less similar things. Many urban theories, such as the Central P...

Potentially influential spaces in the spatial networks of cities can be detected by means of the entropy participation ratios. Local (connectivity) and global (centrality) entropies are considered. While the connectivity entropy has a tendency to increase with the city size, the centrality entropy is decreasing that reflects the global connectedness of cities. In urban networks, the local and global properties of nodes are positively correlated that indicates the intelligibil...

We investigate how efficient each area of urban street network is connected. Using the detour index, geographic features of street network and pairwise efficiency is studied. To do so, the detour index of 1,832,118 travel route pairs for 85 global cities are explored. We show that the detour index in urban street network is strongly dependent on the angular separation of a pair respective to the city center and that it is a unique property introduced by the intrinsic core-per...

Recent studies have revealed the importance of centrality measures to analyze various spatial factors affecting human life in cities. Here we show how it is possible to extract the backbone of a city by deriving spanning trees based on edge betweenness and edge information. By using as sample cases the cities of Bologna and San Francisco, we show how the obtained trees are radically different from those based on edge lengths, and allow an extended comprehension of the ``skele...

Cities are characterized by concentrating population, economic activity and services. However, not all cities are equal and a natural hierarchy at local, regional or global scales spontaneously emerges. In this work, we introduce a method to quantify city influence using geolocated tweets to characterize human mobility. Rome and Paris appear consistently as the cities attracting most diverse visitors. The ratio between locals and non-local visitors turns out to be fundamental...

During the last decade of network research focusing on structural and dynamical properties of networks, the role of network users has been more or less underestimated from the bird's-eye view of global perspective. In this era of global positioning system equipped smartphones, however, a user's ability to access local geometric information and find efficient pathways on networks plays a crucial role, rather than the globally optimal pathways. We present a simple greedy spatia...