Work

Topological Structure of Urban Street Networks from the Perspective of Degree Correlations

Year: 2014

Type: article

Abstract: Many complex networks demonstrate a phenomenon of striking degree correlations: that is, a node tends to link to other nodes with similar (or dissimilar) degrees. From the perspective of degree correlations, in this paper we attempt to characterize topological structures of urban street networks. We adopted six urban street networks (three European and three North American), and converted them into network topologies in which nodes and edges represent individual streets and street intersections, respectively, and compared the network topologies with three reference network topologies (biological, technological, and social). The urban street network topologies (with the exception of Manhattan) showed a consistent pattern that distinctly differs from the three reference networks. The topologies of urban street networks lack striking degree correlations in general. Through reshuffling the network topologies towards, for example, maximum or minimum degree correlations while retaining the initial degree distributions, we found that all the surrogate topologies of the urban street networks, as well as the reference ones, tended to deviate from small-world properties. This implies that the initial degree correlations do not have any positive or negative effect on the networks' performance or functions.

Source: Environment and Planning B Planning and Design

DOI: 10.1068/b39110

Authors: Bin Jiang, Yingying Duan, Feng Lu, Tinghong Yang, Jing Zhao

Institutions: University of Gävle, Chinese Academy of Sciences, State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, PLA Army Service Academy

Language: English

Topic: Urban Design and Spatial Analysis

Subfield: Urban Studies

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Sustainable cities and communities

Open Access status: green

Funder: National Natural Science Foundation of China