Related papers: The Backbone of a City
This article analyzes the complex geometry of urban transportation networks as a gateway to understanding their encompassing urban systems. Using a proposed ring-buffer approach and applying it to 50 urban areas in the United States, we…
The concept of quality of life in urban settings is increasingly associated to the accessibility of amenities within a short walking distance for residents. However, this narrative still requires thorough empirical investigation to evaluate…
Networks often possess mesoscale structures, and studying them can yield insights into both structure and function. It is most common to study community structure, but numerous other types of mesoscale structures also exist. In this paper,…
The quantitative study of traffic dynamics is crucial to ensure the efficiency of urban transportation networks. The current work investigates the spatial properties of congestion, that is, we aim to characterize the city areas where…
We demonstrate that the distribution of betweenness centrality (BC), a global structural metric based on network flow, is an invariant quantity in most planar graphs. We confirm this invariance through an empirical analysis of street…
The massive digital footprints generated by bike-sharing systems in megacities like Shanghai offer a novel perspective on the urban socio-economic fabric. This study investigates whether these daily mobility patterns can quantitatively map…
As cities struggle to adapt to more ``people-centered'' urbanism, transportation planning and engineering must innovate to expand the street network strategically in order to ensure efficiency but also to deter sprawl. Here, we conducted a…
In a graph, the minimum cycle bases are a set of linearly independent cycles that can be used to represent any cycle within that cycle space of graph. These bases are useful in various contexts, including the intricate analysis of…
Human flourishing is often severely limited by persistent violence. Quantitative conflict research has found common temporal and other statistical patterns in warfare, but very little is understood about its general spatial patterns. While…
With a view to the ongoing Bologna project (www.arXiv.org/pdf/nlin.AO/0109025) general organizing principles of emergent structures in social systems are being discussed with a view to the meaning of decentralization. It is proposed to…
We develop a "multifocal" approach to reveal spatial dissimilarities in cities, from the most local scale to the metropolitan one. Think for instance of a statistical variable that may be measured at different scales, eg ethnic group…
In this paper, we combine the most complete record of daily mobility, based on large-scale mobile phone data, with detailed Geographic Information System (GIS) data, uncovering previously hidden patterns in urban road usage. We find that…
Sustainable urban design or planning is not a LEGO-like assembly of prefabricated elements, but an embryo-like growth with persistent differentiation and adaptation towards a coherent whole. The coherent whole has a striking character -…
This paper proposes a new method to analyze the spatial structure of urban systems using ideas from fractals. Regarding a system of cities as a set of "particles" distributed randomly on a triangular lattice, we construct a spatial…
Cities are inherently dynamic. Interesting patterns of behavior typically manifest at several key areas of a city over multiple temporal resolutions. Studying these patterns can greatly help a variety of experts ranging from city planners…
Cities are some of the most intricate and advanced creations of humanity. Most objects in cities are perfectly synchronised to coordinate activities such as jobs, education, transportation, entertainment, and waste management. Although each…
Diversified economies are critical for cities to sustain their growth and development, but they are also costly because diversification often requires expanding a city's capability base. We analyze how cities manage this trade-off by…
The map of a city's streets constitutes a particular case of spatial complex network. However a city is not limited to its topology: it is above all a geometrical object whose particularity is to organize into short and long axes called…
Mobility is a fundamental feature of human life, and through it our interactions with the world and people around us generate complex and consequential social phenomena. Social segregation, one such process, is increasingly acknowledged as…
Large-scale analysis of pedestrian infrastructures, particularly sidewalks, is critical to human-centric urban planning and design. Benefiting from the rich data set of planimetric features and high-resolution orthoimages provided through…