Doing Research on City Roads and Buildings

Our new publication [1] just got accepted recently. The paper deals with the statistical distributions of the measures of spatial spreading of roads and building over the urban zone. I am very happy for my team, composed of Camille, Ardie, and Michelle, for this has been the culmination of year of their undergrad work. 😊

In this post, I would like to go back to the series of decisions that led me to do work on urban zones. I will also discuss some insights about our primary data set, which is the capital region of our country. 

A view from the east of the Metro Manila region.

Working on something new. In 2014, after my postdoc, I rejoined my former university and started my research group on complex systems. Back then, my main concern was in the discrete models of complex behavior, with particular application to natural hazards, which are large-scale nonlinear events in nature. 

Going back to the Philippines, where studies on complex systems was (and still is) a relatively young discipline, I knew I had to diversify and set my sights on other topics where the tools of complexity science can be applied. And one of the things that easily caught my attention is the state of transportation in the Philippines. 

Coming from Germany, where trains and buses arrive on the dot (they actually slow down at times to get to the stops on time), where car drivers follow a strict adherence to the rules, and where pedestrian spaces are wide and beautiful, it was a real adjustment to get used to Manila travelling again. I had to learn how to plan way ahead of time whenever I want to go deep into the metropolis, and to have many alternative plans, for that matter. 

At that point, I realized that this may be a good way to diversify my research. I wanted to quantify the properties of the transportation networks in Metro Manila. And since the capital has a very limited railway network, this means that I have to look at the roads, the main mode through which people and other things get transported within the city. 

Travel on roads is still the main mode of transportation in the metropolis.

Now, another adjustment that I had to deal with was with the people. Sad to say, but research in the Philippines requires you to navigate through personal ‘fiefdoms’ of older people. During that time, there were other groups doing research works involving transportation modeling, and they would like other people to ‘stay away’ from the field (I wish I was kidding, or at least exaggerating, but, actually, those were the exact words they used to, you know, drive us away. Pun intended.). Just like in the actual road setting, where the behavior of the individual drivers affect the state of the traffic as a whole, the mindset of some researchers affect the culture of doing science in the country. (Or, it may be a chicken-and-egg type of problem: are some researchers not open to collaboration due to, or the cause of, the culture? Fun topic, may be left for another day.)

One of the things I noted, though, was the fact that the actual space and time properties of the road networks are not yet investigated (at least for the Manila road network). So that was the topic I decided to explore. 

Early background review. I looked at papers on the topic, to get a feel of the specific aspect of the research work that I wanted to do. Incidentally, I stumbled upon a paper that did a geometrical approach to the characterization of cities. I found this approach very straightforward, since roads are actually geometrical figures; they are like strokes painted on the canvas that is the geographical space. Their intersections, on the other hand, give rise to geometrical forms, some of them very regular, while others have jagged fractal edges. 

Incidentally, the subject of the paper is also interesting, as it focused on the largest 20 German cities, with a particular emphasis on Dresden, the city where I did my postdoc [2]. I got excited looking back at the maps and roads, and even more excited to see how they were reported as numbers and statistics. I observed a result that is quite familiar, i.e. is also found in other complex systems: the occurrence of power-law behavior in the tails of the distribution. 

Back then, I had no idea how to obtain and manipulate these kinds of data. Back then, I was only familiar with Google Maps and Google Earth, and also Wikimapia. But even back then, that didn't deter me from pursuing the topic. I know I can and will find the means to do these things. 

And now. We have just published a paper that looks at the statistical properties of the geometric patterns in Metro Manila cities [1]. This has been the most recent of our works that dealt with the evolution and characteristics of the road network in the conurbation [3-6]. Like a car stuck in Metro Manila rush hour traffic, our research started out slowly and unpredictably, but eventually got to its intended destination. 

I am really proud of my kids. Camille is a promising young researcher, and she has really made the topic her own. Ardie is now an expert geospatial analyst, and we have even cited his work [7] in this most recent paper. And Mich has become a seasoned researcher, a mature Ph.D. student who is more than capable of charting her research directions. Really, more than the paper itself, it is the fact that I made it with this people that makes this even more special and unforgettable. ■

References

[1] Perlada, C.D.,  Orden, A.K. II, Cirunay, M.T. and Batac, R.C. (2021). Quantifying the organization of urban elements through the statistical distributions of their spatial spreading metrics,Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 568, 125717. 

[2] Lämmer, S., Gehlsen, B., & Helbing, D. (2006). Scaling laws in the spatial structure of urban road networks. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 363(1), 89-95. 

[3] Cirunay, M. T., Soriano, M. N., & Batac, R. C. (2020). Preserved layout features embedded in road network development. Journal of Physics: Complexity, 1(1), 015004.  

[4] Perlada, C. D., & Batac, R. C. (2019). Fat Tailed Distributions of the Spatial Metrics of Urban Organization of Metro Manila, Philippines. International Journal of Structural and Civil Engineering Research, 8(4), 398-402.

[5] Cirunay, M. T., Soriano, M. N., & Batac, R. C. (2019). Analysis of the Road Network Evolution through Geographical Information Extracted from Historical Maps: A Case Study of Manila, Philippines. Journal of Advances in Information Technology, 10(3), 114-118.

[6] Cirunay, M. T., & Batac, R. C. (2018). Statistical signatures of the spatial imprints of road network growth. International Journal of Modern Physics C, 29(10), 1850099. 

[7] Orden, A., Flores, R. A., Faustino, P., & Samson, M. S. (2020). Measuring OpenStreetMap building footprint completeness using human settlement layers. In: Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2020, July 2020, pp. 7-8