Roads and cities of 18th century France

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Abstract

The evolution of infrastructure networks such as roads and streets are of utmost importance to understand the evolution of urban systems. However, datasets describing these spatial objects are rare and sparse. The database presented here represents the road network at the french national level described in the historical map of Cassini in the 18th century. The digitization of this historical map is based on a collaborative methodology that we describe in detail. This dataset can be used for a variety of interdisciplinary studies, covering multiple spatial resolutions and ranging from history, geography, urban economics to network science.

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Elementary processes governing the evolution of road networks

Emanuele Strano, Vincenzo Nicosia, Vito Latora … (2012)

Urbanisation is a fundamental phenomenon whose quantitative characterisation is still inadequate. We report here the empirical analysis of a unique data set regarding almost 200 years of evolution of the road network in a large area located north of Milan (Italy). We find that urbanisation is characterised by the homogenisation of cell shapes, and by the stability throughout time of high–centrality roads which constitute the backbone of the urban structure, confirming the importance of historical paths. We show quantitatively that the growth of the network is governed by two elementary processes: (i) ‘densification’, corresponding to an increase in the local density of roads around existing urban centres and (ii) ‘exploration’, whereby new roads trigger the spatial evolution of the urbanisation front. The empirical identification of such simple elementary mechanisms suggests the existence of general, simple properties of urbanisation and opens new directions for its modelling and quantitative description.

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Self-organization versus top-down planning in the evolution of a city

Marc Barthelemy, Patricia Bordin, Henri Berestycki … (2013)

Interventions of central, top-down planning are serious limitations to the possibility of modelling the dynamics of cities. An example is the city of Paris (France), which during the 19th century experienced large modifications supervised by a central authority, the ‘Haussmann period’. In this article, we report an empirical analysis of more than 200 years (1789–2010) of the evolution of the street network of Paris. We show that the usual network measures display a smooth behavior and that the most important quantitative signatures of central planning is the spatial reorganization of centrality and the modification of the block shape distribution. Such effects can only be obtained by structural modifications at a large-scale level, with the creation of new roads not constrained by the existing geometry. The evolution of a city thus seems to result from the superimposition of continuous, local growth processes and punctual changes operating at large spatial scales.

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Limited Urban Growth: London's Street Network Dynamics since the 18th Century

A. Paolo Masucci, Kiril Stanilov, Michael Batty (2013)

We investigate the growth dynamics of Greater London defined by the administrative boundary of the Greater London Authority, based on the evolution of its street network during the last two centuries. This is done by employing a unique dataset, consisting of the planar graph representation of nine time slices of Greater London's road network spanning 224 years, from 1786 to 2010. Within this time-frame, we address the concept of the metropolitan area or city in physical terms, in that urban evolution reveals observable transitions in the distribution of relevant geometrical properties. Given that London has a hard boundary enforced by its long standing green belt, we show that its street network dynamics can be described as a fractal space-filling phenomena up to a capacitated limit, whence its growth can be predicted with a striking level of accuracy. This observation is confirmed by the analytical calculation of key topological properties of the planar graph, such as the topological growth of the network and its average connectivity. This study thus represents an example of a strong violation of Gibrat's law. In particular, we are able to show analytically how London evolves from a more loop-like structure, typical of planned cities, toward a more tree-like structure, typical of self-organized cities. These observations are relevant to the discourse on sustainable urban planning with respect to the control of urban sprawl in many large cities which have developed under the conditions of spatial constraints imposed by green belts and hard urban boundaries.

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Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): Sci Data

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Sci Data

Title: Scientific Data

Publisher: Nature Publishing Group

ISSN (Electronic): 2052-4463

Publication date (Electronic): 15 September 2015

Publication date Collection: 2015

Volume: 2

Electronic Location Identifier: 150048

Affiliations

[1 ] COGIT, IGN , 73 avenue de Paris, Saint-Mande, Cedex 94165, France

[2 ] LaDéHiS, EHESS , 190-198 avenue de France, Paris 75013, France

[3 ] IPhT, CEA, Orme-des-Merisiers , Gif-sur-Yvette 91191, France

[4 ] CAMS, EHESS , 190-198 Avenue de France, Paris 75013, France

Author notes

[a ] J.P. ( julien.perret@ 123456gmail.com ).

[]

J.P. took care of the construction of the database and collaborative tools, initiated the project and wrote the paper. M.G. is responsable for the historical dimension, initiated the project and wrote the paper. M.B. initiated the project and wrote the paper.

Article

Publisher Item ID: sdata201548

DOI: 10.1038/sdata.2015.48

PMC ID: 4571106

SO-VID: b079876f-e598-4cd8-9534-d24b716b3c7a

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 Metadata associated with this Data Descriptor is available at http://www.nature.com/sdata/ and is released under the CC0 waiver to maximize reuse.

Roads and cities of 18th century France

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UCL Grand Challenges: Sustainable Cities

Most cited references 3

Elementary processes governing the evolution of road networks

Self-organization versus top-down planning in the evolution of a city

Limited Urban Growth: London's Street Network Dynamics since the 18th Century

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