Abstract
Cities and towns have often developed infrastructure that enabled a variety of socio-economic interactions. Street networks within these urban settings provide key access to resources, neighborhoods, and cultural facilities. Studies on settlement scaling have also demonstrated that a variety of urban infrastructure and resources indicate clear population scaling relationships in both modern and ancient settings. This article presents an approach that investigates past street network centrality and its relationship to population scaling in urban contexts. Centrality results are compared statistically among different urban settings, which are categorized as orthogonal (i.e., planned) or self-organizing (i.e., organic) urban settings, with places having both characteristics classified as hybrid. Results demonstrate that street nodes have a power law relationship to urban area, where the number of nodes increases and node density decreases in a sub-linear manner for larger sites. Most median centrality values decrease in a negative sub-linear manner as sites are larger, with organic and hybrid urban sites' centrality being generally less and diminishing more rapidly than orthogonal settings. Diminishing centrality shows comparability to modern urban systems, where larger urban districts may restrict overall interaction due to increasing transport costs over wider areas. Centrality results indicate that scaling results have multiples of approximately ⅙ or ⅓ that are comparable to other urban and road infrastructure, suggesting a potential relationship between different infrastructure features and population in urban centers. The results have implications for archaeological settlements where urban street plans are incomplete or undetermined, as it allows forecasts to be made on past urban sites' street network centrality. Additionally, a tool to enable analysis of street networks and centrality is provided as part of the contribution.
Highlights
Measures for street network centrality have been used to understand wider social interactions
Space syntax reflects ideas on urban space networks’ reflection and relation to social, economic, and cognitive factors shaped by space
Urban streets develop around neighborhoods as the basic development area, which creates a more complex pattern of streets that could change direction or abruptly end. Hybrid settlements are those that have a combination of centralized, orthogonal streets and more organic appearing streets [11, 39]. Such settlements can be typical in long-lived towns, such as modern cities that have been occupied since the Medieval period or longer
Summary
Measures for street network centrality have been used to understand wider social interactions. Street network centrality measures are part of wider space syntax analysis. Craane [17] has summarized the characteristics of space syntax It is described as a set of techniques used for analyzing urban spaces as networks, looking at the placement, grouping, and orientation of buildings. Patterns of how networks of space are used are analyzed, such as land use, transport, or security. Linking it to theory, space syntax reflects ideas on urban space networks’ reflection and relation to social, economic, and cognitive factors shaped by space
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