Abstract
Geographical location and landforms of various types have strong effects on the developments of many cities and associated street networks. This study presents new results of landform effects, in particular the geometry of shorelines, on the grid street networks (a total of 10,442 streets) of three Brazilian coastal cities. The results are compared with the street networks of three coastal cities in Britain (a total of 22,002 streets) that have evolved through a more natural “bottom-up” process. Gibbs/Shannon entropy (a measure of dispersion) generally has a positive linear correlation with length ranges and the average lengths of the street, and for the power-law tails in particular. The geometry of the adjacent shorelines has great effect on the spatial orientation of streets in the Brazilian cities but less so for the networks of the British cities. More specifically, the more curved the shoreline, the greater is the dispersion in the street orientation and the greater the associated entropy. The results also show that the length-entropies of the outer parts of the Brazilian cities are generally lower than those of the inner parts, whereas the entropies of outer parts of the British cities are higher than those of the inner parts, indicating dispersion during street-network growth in the British cities.
Highlights
Street networks of a city primarily reflect the interplay of two sets of processes, one related to human decision making, the other related to natural or geographical constraints
At which the power law no longer applies based on the maximum likelihood estimation [9,46], orientation entropy, length range (m), average length (m) of all the street populations for the six cities, and length entropy
For the grid-networks in Caraguatatuba and Balnerio Comboriú the results suggest that where the street orientation peaks (where the network has preferred directions), the longest streets tend to coincide with the peaks
Summary
Street networks of a city primarily reflect the interplay of two sets of processes, one related to human decision making, the other related to natural or geographical constraints. Morphological features or landforms such as shorelines, hill slopes, mountain ranges, rivers, and valleys have strong effects on the development of many cities [1,6]. These effects are evident in the geometry of their street networks [7,8,9]. Of the many natural landforms that provide constraints on the morphology of cities and their street networks, coasts are arguably the most common This is unsurprising given the historical preference for coastal locations, which include a variety of morphological features such as fjords, bays, cliffs, islands, and peninsulas
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