Abstract
The appearance of large geolocated communication datasets has recently increased our understanding of how social networks relate to their physical space. However, many recurrently reported properties, such as the spatial clustering of network communities, have not yet been systematically tested at different scales. In this work we analyze the social network structure of over 25 million phone users from three countries at three different scales: country, provinces and cities. We consistently find that this last urban scenario presents significant differences to common knowledge about social networks. First, the emergence of a giant component in the network seems to be controlled by whether or not the network spans over the entire urban border, almost independently of the population or geographic extension of the city. Second, urban communities are much less geographically clustered than expected. These two findings shed new light on the widely-studied searchability in self-organized networks. By exhaustive simulation of decentralized search strategies we conclude that urban networks are searchable not through geographical proximity as their country-wide counterparts, but through an homophily-driven community structure.
Highlights
They reported that the ultimate models need to incorporate the characteristics of egos, ties, and transportation facilities, there is a general trend of a power law decay of social ties with distance
We discover two features of urban social networks that cause the failure of geographic strategies: urban communities are geographically dispersed and there is not a large connected component in groups of nodes defined by their geographic proximity
These results of urban groups defined by either social distance or geographic distance are in nice agreement with the analytic conditions of networks searchability[39] and support the results reported in routing experiments[33]
Summary
Kowald et al made a comparative study of social ties and their distances, from surveyed of individuals within cities in three different continents. Searchability is a well-established network property that relates to both geographic proximity and social distance: ordinary people are capable of directing messages only through their acquaintances and to reach any target person in only a few steps. We report the performance of different routing strategies and show that geogreedy strategies (choosing the smallest geographical distance to the target) are ineffective within cities while strategies based on social distance (choosing within the smallest community) still work. We discover two features of urban social networks that cause the failure of geographic strategies: urban communities are geographically dispersed and there is not a large connected component in groups of nodes defined by their geographic proximity. This work provides novel evidence of social networks: urban networks form geographically dispersed communities that make them searchable
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
