Characteristics of road network forms in historic districts of Japan

Abstract

This study focused on the structure and the platform of the road space of historic districts. We analyzed the road networks of 16 historic districts in Japan from the perspectives of circularity, accessibility and indirection based on graph theory. By calculating and comparing the indexes of each road network (NW1 and NW2) forms, we quantitatively describe the effects of the main prefectural roads (more than 4 m in width) and narrow streets (less than 4 m in width) on the spatial characteristics. And it turned out that we could divided the 16 objective historic districts into 4 types. Moreover, we qualitatively studied the characteristics of each type of historic districts based on their development background and the structure of road network.

Keywords

Road network forms / Historic districts / Graph theory / Circularity / Accessibility

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2014 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.