Geographic location, network patterns and population distribution of rural settlements in Greece

Abstract

Our work addresses the problem of how social networks are embedded in space, by studying the spread of human population over complex geomorphological terrain. We focus on villages or small cities up to a few thousand inhabitants located in mountainous areas in Greece. This terrain presents a familiar tree-like structure of valleys and land plateaus. Cities are found more often at lower altitudes and exhibit preference on south orientation. Furthermore, the population generally avoids flat land plateaus and river beds, preferring locations slightly uphill, away from the plateau edge. Despite the location diversity regarding geomorphological parameters, we find certain quantitative norms when we examine location and population distributions relative to the (man-made) transportation network. In particular, settlements at radial distance [Formula: see text] away from road network junctions have the same mean altitude, practically independent of [Formula: see text] ranging from a few meters to 10 km. Similarly, the distribution of the settlement population at any given [Formula: see text] is the same for all [Formula: see text]. Finally, the cumulative distribution of the number of rural cities [Formula: see text] is fitted to the Weibull distribution, suggesting that human decisions for creating settlements could be paralleled to mechanisms typically attributed to this particular statistical distribution.