On the problem of boundaries and scaling for urban street networks.

ABSTRACT: Urban morphology has presented significant intellectual challenges to mathematicians and physicists ever since the eighteenth century, when Euler first explored the famous Königsberg bridges problem. Many important regularities and scaling laws have been observed in urban studies, including Zipf's law and Gibrat's law, rendering cities attractive systems for analysis within statistical physics. Nevertheless, a broad consensus on how cities and their boundaries are defined is still lacking. Applying an elementary clustering technique to the street intersection space, we show that growth curves for the maximum cluster size of the largest cities in the UK and in California collapse to a single curve, namely the logistic. Subsequently, by introducing the concept of the condensation threshold,

SUBMITTER: Masucci AP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4614511 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature