How Street Networks Evolve as Cities Grow
Before urban planning, street patterns emerged organically. Understanding the fundamental and man-made forces behind the growth of streetscapes could help guide the development of today’s cities.
Urban planners believe that with regulations we can control the growth of cities. The question is, how can we control a thing if we don’t really know how it behaves? Historically, a lot of analyses have been done by comparing two maps on a qualitative basis. Elementary processes governing the evolution of road networks is the first quantitative analysis of how unplanned street networks evolve over time. This work marks the first time anyone has looked at how those properties change over time.