Comparative Analysis on Topological Structures of Urban Street Networks

Street systems are the backbone of cities. With global urbanization and economic development, street systems have undergone significant development along with the growth of cities. In this paper, the authors select three cities with varying sizes, histories, locations, and growth dynamics: Stockholm, Toronto, and Nanjing. We analyze topological structures of their public street systems based on GIS and complex network theory. Considering the planarity of street systems, we first calculate various topological measures, including α, β, and γ indices, and density. This is followed by comparing three centrality measures, i.e., degree, betweenness, and closeness in complex network theory. In this part, we investigate these characteristics of nodes and edges in a primal representation, and discuss their relations with urban growth mechanisms.