Analysis on the urban street network of Korea: Connections between topology and meta-information

TL;DR

This study explores how the topology of urban street networks in Korea relates to city meta-information, revealing coevolution patterns and the impact of street structure on city efficiency and growth.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis linking street network topology with meta-information, demonstrating coevolution and sublinear scaling in Korean cities.

Findings

Topological centralities correlate with city meta-information.

Coevolution observed between street structure and city attributes.

Street segment length scales sublinearly with population.

Abstract

Cities consist of infrastructure that enables transportation, which can be considered as topology in abstract terms. Once cities are physically organized in terms of infrastructure, people interact with each other to form the values, which can be regarded as the meta-information of the cities. The topology and meta-information coevolve together as the cities are developed. In this study, we investigate the relationship between the topology and meta-information for a street network, which has aspects of both a complex network and planar graph. The degree of organization of a street structure determines the efficiency and productivity of the city in that they act as blood vessels to transport people, goods, and information. We analyze the topological aspect of a street network using centralities including the betweenness, closeness, straightness, and information. We classify the cities into several groups that share common meta-information based on the centrality, indicating that the topological factor of the street structure is closely related to meta-information through coevolution. We also obtain the coevolution in the planned cities using the regularity. Another footprint is the relation between the street segment length and the population, which shows the sublinear scaling.