From paths to blocks: New measures for street patterns

The street network is an important aspect of cities and contains crucial information about their organization and evolution. Characterizing and comparing various street networks could then be helpful for a better understanding of the mechanisms governing the formation and evolution of these systems. Their characterization is however not easy: there are no simple tools to classify planar networks and most of the measures developed for complex networks are not useful when space is relevant. Here, we describe recent efforts in this direction and new methods adapted to spatial networks. We will first discuss measures based on the structure of shortest paths, among which the betweenness centrality. In particular for time-evolving road networks, we will show that the spatial distribution of the betweenness centrality is able to reveal the impact of important structural transformations. Shortest paths are however not the only relevant ones. In particular, they can be very different from those with the smallest number of turns—the simplest paths. The statistical comparison of the lengths of the shortest and simplest paths provides a nontrivial and nonlocal information about the spatial organization of planar graphs. We define the simplicity index as the average ratio of these lengths and the simplicity profile characterizes the simplicity at different scales. Measuring these quantities on artificial (roads, highways, railways) and natural networks (leaves, insect wings) show that there are fundamental differences—probably related to their different function—in the organization of urban and biological systems: there is a clear hierarchy of the lengths of straight lines in biological cases, but they are randomly distributed in urban systems. The paths are however not enough to fully characterize the spatial pattern of planar networks such as streets and roads. Another promising direction is to analyze the statistics of blocks of the planar network. More precisely, we can use the conditional probability distribution of the shape factor of blocks with a given area, and define what could constitute the fingerprint of a city. These fingerprints can then serve as a basis for a classification of cities based on their street patterns. This method applied on more than 130 cities in the world leads to four broad families of cities characterized by different abundances of blocks of a certain area and shape. This classification will be helpful for identifying dominant mechanisms governing the formation and evolution of street patterns.