Centrality Measures in Spatial Networks of Urban Streets

Abstract

We study centrality in urban street patterns of different world cities represented as networks in geographical space. The results indicate that a spatial analysis based on a set of four centrality indices allows an extended visualization and characterization of the city structure. Planned and self-organized cities clearly belong to two different universality classes. In particular, self-organized cities exhibit scale-free properties similar to those found in the degree distributions of non-spatial networks.