Elementary processes governing the evolution of road networks
By Emanuele Strano, Vincenzo Nicosia, Vito Latora, Sergio Porta, Marc Barthelemy. Scientific Reports, 2012
329 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Urbanisation is a fundamental phenomenon whose quantitative characterisation is still inadequate. We report here the empirical analysis of a unique data set regarding almost 200 years of evolution of the road network in a large area located north of Milan (Italy). We find that urbanisation is characterised by the homogenisation of cell shapes and by the stability throughout time of high–centrality roads which constitute the backbone of the urban structure, confirming the importance of historical paths. We show quantitatively that the growth of the network is governed by two elementary processes: (i) ‘densification’, corresponding to an increase in the local density of roads around existing urban centres and (ii) ‘exploration’, whereby new roads trigger the spatial evolution of the urbanisation front. The empirical identification of such simple elementary mechanisms suggests the existence of general, simple properties of urbanisation and opens new directions for its modelling and quantitative description.
Subfields: Building and Construction, Ecology, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/41f55d7f60c244d5dcc22741db1880304a1c3ec5
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Citations in the corpus
- Spatial Science and Network Science: Review and Outcomes of a Complex Relationship (2014, background): “More recently, efforts have been made to model the growth of urban streets to reveal historical paths (B rthélemy and Flammini, 2009; Strano et al., 2012).”
- OSMnx: New methods for acquiring, constructing, analyzing, and visualizing complex street networks (2016, background): “Here we briefly trace the fundamentals of modern street network research fromgraphs to networks to the present landscape of research toolkits, in order to identify current limitations.”
- The statistical physics of cities (2019, background): “Many other aspects of cities have been studied quantitatively, such as the evolution of infrastructure networks [97, 98], the coupling between networks [99], multimodality [100] and heat islands and urban forms [101], in addition to the qualitative studies in social science.”