Urban street networks: a comparative analysis of ten European cities

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.