The present year begins with a new article:
“Not all paths lead to Rome: Analysing the network of sister cities” (arXiv)
In this work with Andreas Kaltenbrunner, David Laniado and Yana Volkovich, we discuss the practice of sister city pairing. Specifically, we investigate structural properties of the resulting city and country networks and present rankings of the most central nodes. We also identify different clusters of countries according to the Louvain Method:
- Violet: USA, Spain and most of South America, Asia, and Africa.
- Green: Eastern Europe and the Balkan countries (strong links among Turkey, Russia and Poland)
- Red: Central and Western Europe (and some of their former colonies)
- Cian: Nordic Countries
We conclude that the practice of sister city pairing is not influenced by geographical proximity but results in highly assortative networks. This research, conducted within the CENIT Social Media project, will be presented in May during the 7th International Workshop on Self-Organizing Systems.
[Edited on February 28] Wired magazine has reviewed the study on the following link: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/02/all-in-the-city-family-the-network-of-sister-cities/
Pablo Aragón 