The Network Analysis of Urban Streets: A Primal Approach

The network metaphor in the analysis of urban and territorial cases has a long tradition, especially in transportation or land-use planning and economic geography. More recently, urban design has brought its contribution by means of the ‘space syntax’ methodology. All these approaches-though under different terms like ‘accessibility’, ‘proximity’, ‘integration’ ‘connectivity’, ‘cost’, or ‘effort’-focus on the idea that some places (or streets) are more important than others because they are more central. The study of centrality in complex systems, however, originated in other scientific areas, namely in structural sociology, well before its use in urban studies; moreover, as a structural property of the…