Social cities: Quality assessment of road infrastructures using a network motif approach

Motivated by the constantly growing interest and real-world applicability shown in complex networks, we model and analyze the network formed by road networks in cities from an innovative perspective. Inspired by similar approaches of comparing networks, we create a methodology that proposes the assessment of city road networks based on their motif distributions. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to fully interpret the roads infrastructure by using network motifs. Based on the similarity of the motif distributions, we choose six diverse cities, create a similarity graph, and discuss the urban influences one has on each other. Through our analysis, we coin the title of Social City to any city which meets particular criteria in terms of optimal roads distribution.