Entendiendo la ciudad como una red

This paper studies how people extract qualitative information from spatial networks and, in particular, how people encode hierarchical information taken from urban grids. It describes an experiment in which fifty - two people were asked to outline the main street of three different spatial systems that were intentionally designed to look alike. People´s answers were evaluated by examining their configurative and metric characteristics. The main findings show that retrieving hierarchical information depends on the coordination of metric (how long a given street is) and configurative properties (how connected to the entire system a street is).