The Evolution and Growth Patterns of the Road Network in a Medium-Sized Developing City: A Historical Investigation of Changchun, China, from 1912 to 2017

Abstract

Understanding the evolution and growth patterns of urban road networks helps to design an efficient and sustainable transport network. The paper proposed a general study framework and analytical workflow based on network theory that could be applied to almost any city to analyze the temporal evolution of road networks. The main tasks follow three steps: vector road network drawing, topology graph generation, and measure classification. Considering data availability and the limitations of existing studies, we took Changchun, China, a middle-sized developing city that is seldom reported in existing studies, as the study area. The research results of Changchun (1912–2017) show the road networks sprawled and densified over time, and the evolution patterns depend on the historical periods and urban planning modes. The evolution of network scales exhibits significant correlation; the population in the city is well correlated with the total road length and car ownership. Each network index also presents specific rules. All road networks are small-world networks, and the arterial roads have been consistent over time; however, the core area changes within the adjacent range but is generally far from the old city. More importantly, we found the correlation between structure and function of the urban road networks in terms of the temporal evolution. However, the temporal evolution pattern shows the correlation varies over time or planning modes, which had not been reported

Capturing the Signature of Topological Evolution from the Snapshots of Road Networks

“…An initial condition for the formation of the infrastructure networks set by a central planning also produces distinct shapes in its earlier stage. However, considering the temporal scale (e.g., decades or centuries) for the growth and evolution of a city, obtaining long historical data of infrastructures [5,6,17] is difficult due to a lack of digitized and georeferenced old maps in Korea. Instead, assuming that common properties of infrastructure networks in meso-to macro-scale can be found along its growth and evolution, we analyzed the snapshots of multiple urban sites which are currently in different stages of growth.…”

“…A complex network is an abstract representation of a system, where system elements are treated as nodes, and node-to-node relationships are represented by links [1,2]. Despite being an abstract representation of reality, complex networks have been widely used to assess structure and function of many critical infrastructure systems including, but not limited to, roads [3][4][5][6], power grids [7][8][9], and water supply systems [10]. ese examples of networks are composed of homogeneous or heterogeneous elements connected in a complex way, leading to emergent outcomes especially in macroscale that are difficult to predict from examining local properties.…”

Towards Sustainable Cities: Utilizing Floating Car Data to Support Location-Based Road Network Performance Measurements

“…These indicators often contain terms such as "mobility" [6], "efficient transportation", or "transportation and roads" [7]. When dealing with the sustainability of transportation and the efficient movement of people and goods, in addition to topics such as railways [8] and public transportation [9][10][11][12][13], the urban road network is a major research area [14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. This stems from the fact that road network performance (RNP) can lead to significant negative impacts on all three dimensions of urban sustainability.…”

Quantitative analysis of the topologic morphology of urban street network based on system coupling theory

“…These changes in studies and ideas reflect street vitality to different extents. Since the beginning of the 21 st century, new technologies have developed for the quantitative description of urban street morphology and their complexity (Cardillo et al, 2006 In China, through paradigm shifts and large-scale urbanization, quantitative research developing new perspectives on street has become an important topic (Tang et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2019;Yue & Zhu, 2019). Street environmental behavior is now the main direction of quantitative research on street morphology.…”