Abstract
The spatial arrangement of urban hubs and centers and how individuals interact with these centers is a crucial problem with many applications ranging from urban planning to epidemiology. We utilize here in an unprecedented manner the large scale, real-time ‘Oyster’ card database of individual person movements in the London subway to reveal the structure and organization of the city. We show that patterns of intraurban movement are strongly heterogeneous in terms of volume, but not in terms of distance travelled, and that there is a polycentric structure composed of large flows organized around a limited number of activity centers. For smaller flows, the pattern of connections becomes richer and more complex and is not strictly hierarchical since it mixes different levels consisting of different orders of magnitude. This new understanding can shed light on the impact of new urban projects on the evolution of the polycentric configuration of a city and the dense structure of its centers and it provides an initial approach to modeling flows in an urban system.
Highlights
The structure of a large city is probably one of the most complex spatial system that we can encounter
In this study, we analyze data for the London underground rail (‘tube’) system collected from the Oyster card which enables us to infer the statistical properties of individual movement patterns in a large urban setting
The main results that we will discuss are that (i) flows are generally of a local nature (ii) they are organized/ aggregated around polycenters and (iii) the examination and decomposition of these flows lead to the description of entangled hierarchies, and (iv) one likely structure describing this large metropolitan area is based on polycentrism. This perspective draws new insights from data that has become available from electronic sources that have so far not been utilised in analyzing the urban spatial structure and in this sense, are unprecedented in the field
Summary
The structure of a large city is probably one of the most complex spatial system that we can encounter. The most prominent and visible effects of such spatial organization of economic activity in large and densely populated urban areas are characterized by severe traffic congestion, uncontrolled urban sprawl of such cities and the strong possibilities of rapidly spreading viruses, biologial and social, through the dense underlying networks [1,2,3]. The mitigation of these undesirable effects depends intrinsically on our understanding of urban structure [4], the spatial arrangement of urban hubs and centers, and how the individuals interact with these centers. In this study, we analyze data for the London underground rail (‘tube’) system collected from the Oyster card (an electronic ticketing system used to record public transport passenger movements and fare tariffs within Greater London) which enables us to infer the statistical properties of individual movement patterns in a large urban setting
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