Centrality Maps and the Analysis of City Street Networks

Firstly introduced in social science, the notion of centrality has spread to the whole complex network science. A centrality is a measure that quantifies whether an element of a network is well served or not, easy to reach, necessary to cross. This paper focuses on cities' street network (seen as a communication network). They redefine two classical centralities (the closeness and the straightness) and introduce the notion of simplest centrality. To this they introduce a mathematical framework which allows considering a city as a geometrical continuum rather than a plain topological graph.