Urban street networks, a comparative analysis of ten European cities

We compare the structural properties of the street networks of ten different European cities using their primal representation. We investigate the properties of the geometry of the networks and a set of centrality measures highlighting differences and similarities between cases. In particular, we found that cities share structural similarities due to their quasiplanarity but that there are also several distinctive geometrical properties. A principal component analysis is performed on the distributions of centralities and their respective moments, which is used to find distinctive characteristics by which we can classify cities into families. We believe that, beyond the improvement of the empirical knowledge on streets' network properties, our findings can open new perspectives into the scientific relationship between city planning and complex networks, stimulating the debate on the effectiveness of the set of knowledge that statistical physics can contribute for city planning and urban-morphology studies.