Urban Network Analysis

Urban network analysis treats a city as a spatial graph of streets and buildings and measures the centrality of each location — how reachable, how central, and how well-connected it is along the actual travel network. Formalized in the Urban Network Analysis toolbox by Andres Sevtsuk and Michael Mekonnen in 2012, it differs from generic network science by weighting graph nodes with real urban data such as building floor area or population and by computing centralities within bounded search radii. The result is a set of metrics — reach, gravity, betweenness, closeness, straightness — that quantify the structural role of every building or street segment in the urban fabric.