Eur. Phys. J. B (2016) 89: 53
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2016-60431-2

Regular Article

Robustness and closeness centrality for self-organized and planned cities

Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College of London, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1N 6TR, UK

^a e-mail: a.masucci@ucl.ac.uk

Received: 29 May 2015
Received in final form: 27 October 2015
Published online: 22 February 2016

Abstract

Street networks are important infrastructural transportation systems that cover a great part of the planet. It is now widely accepted that transportation properties of street networks are better understood in the interplay between the street network itself and the so-called information or dual network, which embeds the topology of the street network’s navigation system. In this work, we present a novel robustness analysis, based on the interaction between the primal and the dual transportation layer for two large metropolises, London and Chicago, thus considering the structural differences to intentional attacks for self-organized and planned cities. We elaborate the results through an accurate closeness centrality analysis in the Euclidean space and in the relationship between primal and dual space. Interestingly enough, we find that even if the considered planar graphs display very distinct properties, the information space induce them to converge toward systems which are similar in terms of transportation properties.