Along the sun-drenched roadside*
The earth-circling journey of Helios’ chariot brought life and light to the inhabitants of the earth where they built cities and paved their roads. Rhetorically, how did this deity allot light to the mortals?
In this blog, Critical Energy features the recently published and original work of Sara Najem, a Lebanese data-loving scientist, on assessing cities’ solar energy potential using their road network.
Apparently, there is a latent dependence between the solar potential of cities and the length of their corresponding road network. This correlation seems to remain valid down to the scale of a block.
This is a first attempt at exploring the relation between a city’s solar potential and its road network topology by drawing parallels with living systems allometry and its dependence on the topology of the vascular network.
This is based on a simple observation that the road length and the number of erect buildings are interdependent, which in turn control the solar potential.
In the process, Sara identified a measure of social stratification according to which resources could be allocated based on common needs. Her findings raise the question about the existence of universal laws typifying rural and suburban areas’ solar potential and serve as a tool for estimating metrics which are relevant to sustainability science and to cities economic development.
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Contribution: Sara Najem
This blog is based on Sara Najem’s paper “Solar potential scaling and the urban road network topology”, PHYSICAL REVIEW E 95, 012323 (2017)
(*) Rainer Maria Rilke
