Redrawing the Map of Great Britain from a Network of Human Interactions
Name
Ratti-2010-Redrawing the Map of Great Britain from a Network of Human Interactions.pdf
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Author(s)
Ratti, Carlo
Sobolevsky, Stanislav
Calabrese, Francesco
Andris, Clio
Reades, Jonathan
Martino, Mauro
Claxton, Rob
Strogatz, Steven
Date Issued
December 2010
Journal
PLoS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Citation
Ratti C, Sobolevsky S, Calabrese F, Andris C, Reades J, et al. (2010) Redrawing the Map of Great Britain from a Network of Human Interactions. PLoS ONE 5(12): e14248. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0014248
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Do regional boundaries defined by governments respect the more natural ways that people interact across space? This paper proposes a novel, fine-grained approach to regional delineation, based on analyzing networks of billions of individual human transactions. Given a geographical area and some measure of the strength of links between its inhabitants, we show how to partition the area into smaller, non-overlapping regions while minimizing the disruption to each person's links. We tested our method on the largest non-Internet human network, inferred from a large telecommunications database in Great Britain. Our partitioning algorithm yields geographically cohesive regions that correspond remarkably well with administrative regions, while unveiling unexpected spatial structures that had previously only been hypothesized in the literature. We also quantify the effects of partitioning, showing for instance that the effects of a possible secession of Wales from Great Britain would be twice as disruptive for the human network than that of Scotland.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning
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Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0014248
