The urban “informal” neighborhoods in developing countries are the spatial outcomes of the informal economic relations and practices in cities. The emerge of these neighborhoods in Turkey goes back to the 1965’s in parallel to the rapid growth of private industry, followed by an immense amount of migration to big cities. The urban patterns of these “informal” neighborhoods can still be traced. In this study, the graph theory is used to compare the spatial structure of “formal” and “informal” neighborhoods of Izmir. Two neighborhoods to represent “formal” and “informal” urban patterns are selected: 1 Bostanli and 2 Ballikuyu . Six different graph theory-based centrality indices are calculated for each neighborhood: 1 edge density, 2 edge sinuosity, 3 eta index, 4 node density, 5 order of a node, and 6 beta index. The results showed that the urban street patterns pertaining to “formal” and “informal” neighborhoods of Izmir, measured through graph theory-based centrality indices, are remarkably different, and the results are statistically significant. However, the urban street network produced through a legal process is not necessarily superior to the legal one, when the graph theory-based indices are considered. Further research may consider a broader range of time and space to generalize these results
Primary Language | English |
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Journal Section | Research Article |
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Publication Date | April 1, 2017 |
Published in Issue | Year 2017 Volume: 2 Issue: 2 |