Hidden geometry of urban landscapes for smart city planners

Abstract

Urbanization has been the dominant demographic trend in the entire world, during the last half century. Rural to urban migration, international migration, and the reclassification or expansion of existing city boundaries have been among the major reasons for increasing urban population. The essentially fast growth of cities in the last decades urgently calls for a profound insight into the common principles stirring the structure of urban developments all over the world. In the present chapter, we discuss the graph representations of urban spatial structures and suggested a computationally simple technique that can be used in order to spot the relatively isolated locations and neighborhoods, to detect urban sprawl, and to illuminate the hidden community structures in complex urban textures. The approach may be implemented for the detailed expertise of any urban pattern and the associated transport networks that may include many transportation modes.