PONE-D-21-15963

The structure, centrality, and scale of urban street networks: Cases from Pre-Industrial Afro-Eurasia

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Title

The structure, centrality, and scale of urban street networks: Cases from Pre-Industrial Afro-Eurasia

This ms seeks to describe scaling relationships and Centrality of urban street networks across a large set of pre-intdustrial and ancient cities in Eurasia.

I enjoyed reading this ms. It is well written and scientifically sound. Methods are wel described.

This is a great contribution to the literature building on specific findings of urban scaling.

I have some concerns regarding the definition of hybrid/organic cities, while it seem intuitive, it would be helpfull to see which cities have been classified as such. A suggestion for this would be to include such information in Figure 1 perhaps.

My next concern regards the analyses of density plots. Some Centrality metrics show bimodal distribution. Why is that? Could this be related to my previous point? Particularly, Harmonic, Degree, Straightness, Katz and Betweenness to some degree. This is worth mentioning in the discussion.

Reviewer #2: General comment

The paper shows results of common centrality properties for different types of cities found in different regions as well as different periods.

It's a very interesting idea to investigate scaling relationships for centrality measures in different types of cities. The methodology and the outputs are also very interesting with a significant added value within the geo-archeological fieldwork.

The results demonstrated different centrality distributions and different scaling relationships between planned and organic cities.

Minor global comments:

- There are many indicators computed and presented. One could argue that some of them may bring the same kind of information. It could be interesting to show that they are not giving correlated results.

- The text is overall very well structured and clear, but few times sentences are quite long, with a complex structure, and we miss the point. Those specific sentences are detailed in the next paragraph “detailed comments.”

Detailed comments:

Abstract

l.20 – l.22: The sentence is hard to read. It would be better to reformulate.

Introduction

l. 59: The term of “urban area” could be better defined.

l. 69: repetition of “assess”

l.79: “…and centrality and urban area.” You can use a comma to avoid repeating “and” and make the sentence clearer.

l.80: We have the information about the layouts after but few words more about it in this part could be relevant.

l. 97: repetition of “how”

l.112 – l.116: The sentence is too complex. It would be better to simplify by writing one sentence for one idea at a time.

Background

The background section presents the scientific context of the paper that was already addressed in the introduction section without being detailed. It seems possible to avoid some redundancies between the two sections.

Urban Scaling

In this paragraph the word “demonstrate” is used 12 times! It would be better to reformulate. (Especially the sentence l. 131 to 134).

l. 134 : typo : [7,30)

Materials and Methods

l. 173-174: The classification in “orthogonal” or “organic” would gain to be developed

l.229 – l.233: The sentence is unclear (too long).

l.247: I would suggest adding one sentence to explain the 30 degree threshold.

Results

- In figures 4 and 5, x and y axes are not with the same scale between plots of the same indicator for each types, which make their comparison harder.

- In figure 5 the legend mention a “dashed lines showing median values” which is not present on the plots.

- In figure 6, same problem of scale between 6a and 6c on the one hand, and 6b and 6d on the other.

- Figures 7 and 8: Why it is not the same number of periods? Is it related to data availability? It would be better to explain why the results are comparable while the inputs considered are not the same for the two different street layout type.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Horacio Samaniego

Reviewer #2: Yes: Claire Lagesse

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Submitted filename: PONE-D-21-15963_reviewer.pdf

The structure, centrality, and scale of urban street networks: Cases from Pre-Industrial Afro-Eurasia

PONE-D-21-15963R1

Dear Dr. Altaweel,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. In this process, I recommend to also apply the corrections to the text suggested by reviewer 2.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Riccardo Gallotti

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: I am very happy with the way that authors have addressed my concerns and now see a clear improvement in the article quality. I congratulate the authors and recommend the publication of this manuscript.

Reviewer #2: Here is a list of minor comments about the text. Please note that the absence of line numbering gives the references to the text not very handy.

Abstract :

“This article presents an approach that investigates past street network centrality measures urban and its relationship to population scaling in urban context”.

: typo (the word "urban" should be deleted).

Introduction :

“Settlement scaling approaches have been used in archaeology as a means to better understand how a variety of other social interactions, including related to trade and information flow, are shared within urban spaces [5,6,7,8]”.

: The sentence is a bit confusing with « including related » , is it “including those related”?

It analyzes urban street layouts and their centrality values, using a tool developed by this article and made available in the supporting materials, measuring how they scale relative to urban area estimates, that is occupation size for a given period. “

: Is it “how they scale relatively to urban area” ?

“Urban locations are assessed based on their street organization, including orthogonal (i.e., rectilinear, planned or grid-pattern streets), organic, that is self-organizing streets that generally develop around neighborhoods, and hybrid streets, which have a combination or mixture of orthogonal and organic street networks [11].”

: The end of the sentence is not necessary (it is implied), it would be better to remove it as the sentence is already really long.

“These centrality measures are compared for the different types of urban settings analyzed, with orthogonal and organic or hybrid used as the two main analytical categories due to structural similarities between hybrid and organic sites.”

: Is it for the analyzed urban settings"?

“Results for network centrality distributions, centrality, and urban area scaling”

: maybe make clearer what the second term of “centrality” is referring to (characterization of the structure)

: if needed, this is a suggestion of article about the the characterization of road network, with a method derived from spatial syntax ensuring the independence from border effect : Lagesse, C., Bordin, P., & Douady, S. (2015). A spatial multi-scale object to analyze road networks. Network Science, 3(1), 156-181.

Background

“Patterns of how networks of space are used are also analyzed, such as land use, transport, or security”

: typo (are used are also analyzed)

“In the analysis of street networks, a variety of techniques to understand urban and non-urban roads are used, with graph analysis being the most common set of methods applied for understanding street network relationships and relationships of regions and sub-regions in defined settings [18, 19].”

: repetition (“relationships and relationships”)

Scaling Approach

“This means that, although we would expect the geometry of the street network to be related to (i.e., a product of and a constraint on)city area,there is no reason for believing that any of the network values that are discussed below should take on a specific baseline value or that this baseline value will change significantly over time. This suggests, in turn, that it is also legitimate to collapse examples from different historical and geographical periods into a single scaling relationship.”

: long and unclear

: typos (spaces missing)

Results

Centrality Distributions

“Additionally, the distributions are compared using a Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxen test with a Holm–Bonferroni method [59], where all distributions, within and between the categories, showed significant

differences at p-value<0.01 levels.”

: typo (Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon)

: I suggest to be careful with those kind of tests because they are quite sensitive to the scale of the sample. I was more expecting a correlation matrix to insure the independence of variables...

“For Figures 4 and 5, we note that the x- and y-axes are different in the figures due to distribution variations that made the same ranges difficult to apply.”

: you should make clearer that the focus is on the shape here, independently from the scale

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: Yes: Horacio Samaniego

Reviewer #2: Yes: Claire Lagesse