Co-evolution of density and topology in a simple model of city formation

Abstract

We study the influence that population density and the road network have on each others' growth and evolution. We use a simple model of formation and evolution of city roads which reproduces the most important empirical features of street networks in cities. Within this framework, we explicitely introduce the topology of the road network and analyze how it evolves and interact with the evolution of population density. We show that accessibility issues -pushing individuals to get closer to high centrality nodes- lead to high density regions and the appearance of densely populated centers. In particular, this model reproduces the empirical fact that the density profile decreases exponentially from a core district. In this simplified model, the size of the core district depends on the relative importance of transportation and rent costs.

13 pages, 13 figures

References in corpus (6)

• The spatial structure of networks
• Scaling laws in the spatial structure of urban road networks
• Modeling urban street patterns
• Networks and Cities: An Information Perspective
• Optimal design of spatial distribution networks
• A network-based prediction of retail stores commercial categories and optimal locations

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Modeling the Small-World Phenomenon with Road Networks
• An interdisciplinary bibliometric analysis of models for land-use and transport interactions
• Exploring the interplay between population profile and optimal routes in U.S. cities
• Complementarity of generative models for road networks
• Using Ensemble Analysis to study the effects of Network Topology on Performance in Urban Road Networks