The Network Analysis of Urban Streets of Tirana

In this article we use Multiple Centrality Assessment (MCA) based on the idea of Sergio Porta [Por06]. We apply MCA for the urban streets of Tirana. MCA is based on primal, rather than dual, street graphs, it works within a metric, rather than topological, framework and it investigates a plurality of peer centrality indices. We show that, in the MCA primal approach, some centrality indices nicely capture the ‘skeleton’ of the urban structure that impacts so much on economic and cultural development of the city, which is also the purpose of our study. Moreover, the distributions of centrality in self-organized cities are different from those in planned cities. In our analysis we are considering all roads for vehicles, pedestrian paths and even the closed roads, which appear as leaves in the primary graph (vertex degree k=1). The area considered in this study is 4.392052∙10 6 m 2 (1.7 miles 2 ). We have built two databases for the sake of the study. One database contains information about edges like the vertex pairs of each edge and their weight (length in meters). The total number of edges is K = 1964. The other database contains information about geographical location of vertices (Longitude, Latitude for each vertex). The total number of edges is N=1565. After all the analysis, we’ll see if Tirana is a self-organized city or a planned one.