Urban Landscape is an Important Factor in Rising Inequality, Spatial Segregation, and Social Isolation

TL;DR

This paper explores how urban landscapes influence inequality, segregation, and social isolation, proposing a graph-based method to analyze urban spatial structures and detect isolated areas, sprawl, and community patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a simple computational technique for analyzing urban spatial structures using graph representations, aiding in understanding urban development and transportation networks.

Findings

Identifies isolated neighborhoods and urban sprawl.

Detects hidden community structures in urban textures.

Applicable to various urban and transport network analyses.

Abstract

Urbanization has been the dominant demographic trend in the entire world, during the last half century. Rural to urban migration, international migration, and the re-classification or expansion of existing city boundaries have been among the major reasons for increasing urban population. The essentially fast growth of cities in the last decades urgently calls for a profound insight into the common principles stirring the structure of urban developments all over the world. We have discussed the graph representations of urban spatial structures and suggested a computationally simple technique that can be used in order to spot the relatively isolated locations and neighborhoods, to detect urban sprawl, and to illuminate the hidden community structures in complex urban textures. The approach may be implemented for the detailed expertise of any urban pattern and the associated transport networks that may include many transportation modes.