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

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.In this study, we analyzed the urban street network of 22 cities in Korea. Each city has its own distinctive properties, and hence its street structures are diverse. For example, cities have different roles, and there include capital, satellite, farming, or industrial specialized cities. An industrial specialized city has a different street structure compared to a farming town. In addition, cities have different histories. Some cities were founded in the medieval era, while others were established in the modern era. Medieval cities have irregular street patterns with short or crooked streets, while modern cities have a hierarchical structure with regular, rectilinear, orthogonal, or tree-like patterns [18]. The topography is another factor that characterizes the street pattern; cities in flatlands, mountains, or by the seaside have their own distinctive street structures, which are determined by geographical constraints. Different cultural, social, and economic backgrounds determine the street patterns of a given city. For instance, most Americans prefer detached houses as opposed to apartments, but most Koreans have the opposite taste.The meta-information is basically information about information. Although the city has the physical structure, it is also composed of various kinds of information. For example, a person is the element of the city and is also information in the document. However, a whole collection of people, i.e. the population, is the meta-information because it is information about information. Above mentioned four properties are also kinds of the meta-information. Other types of meta-information include the area of the city, the gross regional domestic product (GRDP), the GRDP per capita, the total or average street segment...

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