Graph theory was used to present the consistency and regionalisation of Poland’s

What is it about?

Graph theory was used to present the consistency and regionalisation of Poland’s network of urban settlement in 1931, 1950 and 2002. The vertices show towns and cities (as points), while the edges refl ect distances between such urban centres, where these are located no further than 25 km apart. Simple graphs were used, and advantage taken of the properties of connected and disconnected (cohesive or non-cohesive) graphs, with graph connectivity studied to assess persistence in the settlement network. A connected graph may become disconnected when one vertex is removed, and in the context of the urban settlement network this denotes a town or city losing its rights and becoming part of the set of rural settlements.

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Why is it important?

Thanks to the functions provided by GIS tools and, in particular, the utilisation of additional layers with rivers and historical borders in graph analyses, the interpretationof graph connectivity was able to take into account the historical aspect.

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