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Record W4408200541 · doi:10.1016/j.cities.2025.105844

Street network connectivity leads to denser urban form in Canadian cities

2025· article· en· W4408200541 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueCities · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicUrban Design and Spatial Analysis
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research CouncilSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaMcGill University
KeywordsEconomic geographyBusinessGeographyEnvironmental planning

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The layout of streets forms a skeleton of cities that shapes the long-term development of urban form and land use. The enduring nature of street connectivity implies that any later modifications to other elements of urban infrastructure cannot escape the constraints imposed by the initial street connectivity. Hence, this study examines whether initial street network connectivity leads to subsequent densification. Using Canadian urban neighborhoods as an empirical context, we provide a causal estimation of the effect of the Street-Network Disconnectedness index (SNDi)—a measure of how disconnected a street network is—on densification. Our estimation shows that a 10 % increase in SNDi leads to a considerable 17 % decrease in population density change. The study also provides strong evidence of the spillover effect of surrounding SNDi on the subsequent evolution of density. These results underscore the necessary function of street network connectivity in densification, reinforcing its need in planning policies aimed at reducing transport emissions through densification. • Offers causal evidence of low street connectivity being ‘density-proof’. • Transitioning from a cul-de-sac to a grid results in a neighborhood that is 190 % denser. • Influence of the street network on the urban form transcends both time and space.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.777
Threshold uncertainty score0.835

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.193
Teacher spread0.185 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it