Hanna, Sean; (2024) The natural scale of urban networks: Intelligibility is not scale-free. In: Proceedings of SSS14: The 14th International Space Syntax Symposium. Space Syntax Network: Nicosia, Cyprus.

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Abstract

Angular street segment measures are used to analyse the degree to which network intelligibility of cities becomes evident at different scales. It is shown that the phenomenon is not scaleinvariant, but has a distinct peak at which correlations are highest, providing a recognisable scale of any given city map that results from its broad network structure rather than individual features such as mean street length. For actual street networks it is found that this scale corresponds with the radius at which Syntax measures such as choice best predict human movement within the city. These results may explain the relationship between individual navigation strategies and urban form, and why Space Syntax techniques as different as centrality measures and agent simulation should both be effective in predicting movement. Syntactic intelligibility appears to operate at a particular radius around 2-4km; at this scale, both a perfectly informed strategy of route minimisation (network centrality measures) and a locally opportunistic navigation (stochastic agent simulations) yield similar patterns. Empirical evidence indicates this is the scale at which both correlate with observed movement and of an average journey length. The networks examined can thus be considered to be optimised to convey the most relevant information on likely journeys to navigators throughout the network, and to do it at the most useful scale.

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