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A methodology to assess the spatial configuration of urban systems in Iran from an interaction perspective

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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to develop a methodology for identifying various dimensions of the spatial configuration of urban systems in Iran from an interaction perspective. Through the provision of empirical evidence of different types of flows of people including air passenger flows, passenger flows by bus and car, this paper compares the resulting spatial constellations of these flows through the innovative use of indices to systematically describe and measure five dimensions of an urban system’s spatial configuration that include: (1) centrality and dominance of vertices, (2) network cohesion, (3) network strength, (4) network symmetry, and (5) communities and levels. The findings show that although the spatial configurations of different flows are not the same, all were characterized by having a significant distance within a polycentric urban system due to the primacy of the Tehran metropolis. In regard to passenger flows by car and bus, it was found that for various functional regions, there was a balanced distribution of centrality and urban hierarchy evident in Iran. By contrast, air passenger flows were not able to determine centrality within a national urban hierarchy because of the limited distribution of centers for air travel in Iran at higher levels of spatial organization.

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Notes

  1. Alborz Province has Karaj as its capital and was formed in 2010/06/28 after separation from Tehran Province. Hence, this province was not taken into consideration in calculations of this research.

  2. It should be noted that at present, due to various factors such as height or desert areas and high administrative costs, the inter-urban rail transport network is still incomplete and some of Iran’s major cities are not connected to the rail network. Furthermore, since some of the provincial capitals still do not have access to the rail transportation network, these flows for assessing Iran’s urban system were excluded from the analysis in this study.

  3. The smallest distance among the studied cities was Isfahan-Shahrekord with 84 km and other cities were located more than 100 km away from each other.

  4. Extracting valid mathematical relations for each dimension is needed in rectifying the multicolinearity effects because the indices have direct relations to each other. In this article the combination of results for each dimension has been made possible by algebra summation and it has been done this way to allow comparison of a dimension’s values for each network. Hence, this does not mean that for example the centrality of vertices is the simple sum of its indices (i.e. strength + betweenness + closeness + eigenvector).

  5. For the vertices with a degree of 0 or 1, the network topological clustering coefficient is 0 by convention and it decreases as the increase in the degree of the vertex.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr. Amirreza Mamdoohi, Mrs Tayyebeh Shorkrnia and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable and insightful comments and suggestions which helped us to improve the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

    Hashem Dadashpoor & Atoosa Afaghpoor

  2. University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

    Andrew Allan

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  1. Hashem Dadashpoor
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  2. Atoosa Afaghpoor
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Correspondence to Hashem Dadashpoor.

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Fig. 6
figure 6

Functional regions and hierarchy of city system at air flow (a), flow by bus (b) and flow by car (c)

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Dadashpoor, H., Afaghpoor, A. & Allan, A. A methodology to assess the spatial configuration of urban systems in Iran from an interaction perspective. GeoJournal 82, 109–129 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-015-9671-1

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