{
  "abstract": "Urban street networks are modeled as spatial graphs whose geometry reflects planning, history, and physical constraints. Global orientation measures describe the overall order of a city but do not reveal how street directions form coherent neighborhoods. Here we introduce bearings communities---spatially connected domains whose streets share a common orientation---and analyze them using concepts from the physics of polycrystalline materials. Across $1025$ large cities worldwide, these domains are almost perfectly ordered: their mean coherence is $0.964$ and varies by only $1.4\\%$ from one city to the next, far above the value expected for randomly oriented streets. Every city is therefore a mosaic of well-ordered orientational grains, differing only in their number, size, and mutual alignment. Because the grains are equally regular everywhere, a city's global order is set mainly by how many of them it averages over: a city appears ordered because it is built from a few large grains, not because its fabric is locally more regular. A null model in which grain orientations are randomized confirms this grain-counting mechanism. Finally, the interface fraction $γ$ measures how strongly domains interlock, yielding a morphology diagram that organizes cities continuously between grid-like, polycrystalline, and fragmented limits.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": "2609.13029",
  "author_total": 2,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Marc Barthelemy"
    },
    {
      "name": "Geoff Boeing"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/4d26gfre4dy33.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.48550/arxiv.2609.13029",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "4d26gfre4dy33",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13029",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "LicenseRef-arXiv-nonexclusive-1.0",
  "licence_label": "arXiv licence",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
  "metadata_licence": "CC0-1.0",
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "arxiv",
      "cond-mat.soft"
    ],
    [
      "arxiv",
      "cond-mat.stat-mech"
    ],
    [
      "arxiv",
      "physics.soc-ph"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": null,
  "pdf_url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.13029",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-09-11",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/4d26gfre4dy33.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:21:07Z",
      "native_id": "2609.13029",
      "source": "arxiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13029"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "physics",
      "origin": "arxiv:cond-mat.soft",
      "subfield": "condensed-matter"
    },
    {
      "field": "physics",
      "origin": "arxiv:cond-mat.stat-mech",
      "subfield": "statistical-nonlinear"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Geometry of Urban Order",
  "title_text": "Geometry of Urban Order",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:21:07Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/4d26gfre4dy33",
  "venue": "arXiv",
  "versions": []
}