Street Angularity and Patterns in Palembang and Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Abstract

There is a lack of comparative studies on the street geometry, patterns and angularity of cities, especially those in developing countries such as Indonesia. The problem can be attributed to limited technical knowledge, traditional data collection challenges, and limited data samples. This research used two cities in Indonesia to study differences in street patterns and angularity. They were Palembang the oldest city, and Yogyakarta a planned Sultanate city of the country. 14 different study areas, each measuring 2 miles by 2 miles, were selected from each of the cities. These areas represented five different functional categories historic housing district, unplanned Housing district, planned housing district, historic commercial district, and commercial district.  The data acquired for this research included maps from OpenStreetMap (OSM) that were processed using OSMnx, software built on top of Pythons Networkx, matplotlib and geopandas libraries a rich network analytical visualization application. Using OSMnx, the centerline maps of the cities were extracted; which, then, were exported into various file extensions for GIS multi-platform applications to run a spatial analysis. The edge bearing graphs for each of the 14 study areas from each city were obtained from OSMnx. These graphs were compared to see if these areas show similarities and differences in terms of functional categories.

Findings show that Palembang has more variations in street angularity when compared with Yogyakarta areas. Within and between cities, study areas did not show consistent differences based on functional categories. Instead, differences observed in the angularity of streets of these cities appeared to be both historical and cultural in nature.