Urban street networks: a comparative analysis of ten European cities

TL;DR

This study compares the structural and geometric properties of street networks in ten European cities, revealing both commonalities and distinctive features, and classifies cities into families based on centrality measures.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of urban street networks using complex network metrics and PCA, offering new insights into city classification and urban morphology.

Findings

Cities share structural similarities due to quasi planarity.

Distinct geometrical properties differentiate cities.

PCA classifies cities into distinct families.

Abstract

We compare the structural properties of the street networks of ten different European cities using their primal representation. We investigate the properties of the geometry of the networks and a set of centrality measures highlighting differences and similarities among cases. In particular, we found that cities share structural similarities due to their quasi planarity but that there are also several distinctive geometrical proprieties. A Principal Component Analysis is also performed on the distributions of centralities and their respective moments, which is used to find distinctive characteristics by which we can classify cities into families. We believe that, beyond the improvement of the empirical knowledge on streets network proprieties, our findings can open new perspectives in the scientific relation between city planning and complex networks, stimulating the debate on the effectiveness of the set of knowledge that statistical physics can contribute for city planning and urban morphology studies.