Cities and Regions in Britain through hierarchical percolation

Abstract

Urban systems present hierarchical structures at many different scales. These are observed as administrative regional delimitations which are the outcome of complex geographical, political and historical processes which leave almost indelible footprints on infrastructure such as the street network. In this work we uncover a set of hierarchies in Britain at different scales using percolation theory on the street network and on its intersections which are the primary points of interaction and urban agglomeration. At the larger scales, the observed hierarchical structures can be interpreted as regional fractures of Britain, observed in various forms, from natural boundaries, such as National Parks, to regional divisions based on social class and wealth such as the well-known North-South divide. At smaller scales, cities are generated through recursive percolations on each of the emerging regional clusters. We examine the evolution of the morphology of the system as a whole, by measuring the fractal dimension of the clusters at each distance threshold in the percolation. We observe that this reaches a maximum plateau at a specific distance. The clusters defined at this distance threshold are in excellent correspondence with the boundaries of cities recovered from satellite images, and from previous methods using population density.

20 pages, 14 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Laws of Population Growth
• Multifractal to monofractal evolution of the London's street network

Cited by in corpus (22)

• The Scales of Human Mobility
• Quantifying urban areas with multi-source data based on percolation theory
• Small cities face greater impact from automation
• General scores for accessibility and inequality measures in urban areas
• Urban retail dynamics: insights from percolation theory and spatial interaction modelling
• Multifractal scaling analyses of urban street network structure: the cases of twelve megacities in China
• Constructing multi-level urban clusters based on population distributions and interactions
• The impact of social influence in Australian real-estate: market forecasting with a spatial agent-based model
• Spatial Patterns in Urban Systems
• City limits in the age of smartphones and urban scaling
• Truncated lognormal distributions and scaling in the size of naturally defined population clusters
• Some recent advances in urban system science: models and data
• A worldwide model for boundaries of urban settlements
• A scaling theory of armed conflict avalanches
• The Polycentric Dynamics of Melbourne and Sydney: Suburb attractiveness divides a city at the home ownership level
• Multilayer modeling of adoption dynamics in energy demand management
• Renyi's spectra of urban form for different modalities of input data
• Spatial Point Pattern and Urban Morphology: Perspectives from Entropy, Complexity and Networks
• Diffusive resettlement: irreversible urban transitions in closed systems
• Characterizing network circuity among heterogeneous urban amenities
• Understanding the illicit drug distribution in England: a data-centric approach to the County Lines Model
• Mapping Regional Disparities in Discounted Grocery Products