IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/vrs/quageo/v31y2012i2p29-37n4.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

City Shape and the Fractality of Street Patterns

Author

Listed:
  • Mohajeri Nahid
  • Longley Paul
  • Batty Michael

    (Department of Geography and Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, UK)

Abstract

This paper discusses, first, the concepts of fractals and power laws in relation to the street patterns of the city of Dundee, East Scotland and, second, the results of the measurement of 6,004 street segments in the city. The trends of the street segments are presented through rose diagrams and show that there are two main street trends in the city: one is parallel with the coast, the other is roughly perpendicular to the coast. It is clear that the coastline largely regulates the street trend, because both the main street trends change along the city so as to be nearly coast-perpendicular and coast-parallel everywhere. The lengths of the street segments follow power laws. When presented on log-log plots, however, the result is not a single straight line but two straight lines. At the break in line slope, the fractal dimension changes from 0.88 to 2.20. The change occurs at the step length of about 100 m, indicating that the short streets belong to a population that is different from that of the longer streets.

Suggested Citation

  • Mohajeri Nahid & Longley Paul & Batty Michael, 2012. "City Shape and the Fractality of Street Patterns," Quaestiones Geographicae, Sciendo, vol. 31(2), pages 29-37, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:vrs:quageo:v:31:y:2012:i:2:p:29-37:n:4
    DOI: 10.2478/v10117-012-0016-6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.2478/v10117-012-0016-6
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.2478/v10117-012-0016-6?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    fractal; street network; city;
    All these keywords.

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:vrs:quageo:v:31:y:2012:i:2:p:29-37:n:4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Peter Golla (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.sciendo.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.