Methods and Measures for Analyzing Complex Street Networks and Urban Form

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework and a new tool, OSMnx, for analyzing the complexity of urban street networks, providing insights into their structure and implications for urban planning and design.

Contribution

It introduces OSMnx, a novel tool for collecting and analyzing global street network data, and presents a large empirical study of 27,000 networks to assess their complexity.

Findings

OSMnx enables detailed analysis of street network morphology.

Urban street networks exhibit diverse levels of complexity.

Empirical data links network complexity to urban design and transportation.

Abstract

Complex systems have been widely studied by social and natural scientists in terms of their dynamics and their structure. Scholars of cities and urban planning have incorporated complexity theories from qualitative and quantitative perspectives. From a structural standpoint, the urban form may be characterized by the morphological complexity of its circulation networks - particularly their density, resilience, centrality, and connectedness. This dissertation unpacks theories of nonlinearity and complex systems, then develops a framework for assessing the complexity of urban form and street networks. It introduces a new tool, OSMnx, to collect street network and other urban form data for anywhere in the world, then analyze and visualize them. Finally, it presents a large empirical study of 27,000 street networks, examining their metric and topological complexity relevant to urban design, transportation research, and the human experience of the built environment.