Big Sister Cities: How They Are Related

Big Sister Cities is an interactive network graph showing 279 cities with more than 1 million inhabitants and how they are connected to their sister cities within this set. The cities are the nodes which are sized by degree and colored by population and the 852 edges show the sister relations. The data for creating this graph was retrieved from Wikidata in April 2018.

Top 20 cities by number of sister cities

The following list shows the 20 most connected cities within the network. The city name links to the highlighted node in the network, the first number is the count of sister cities and the second the population.

  1. Chongqing - 77 - 1,039,000
  2. Istanbul - 71 - 14,657,434
  3. Beijing - 58 - 21,710,000
  4. Rio de Janeiro - 53 - 6,476,631
  5. Shanghai - 53 - 23,390,000
  6. Buenos Aires - 53 - 2,890,151
  7. Moscow - 51 - 12,500,123
  8. Bangkok - 48 - 5,696,409
  9. Chicago - 42 - 2,722,389
  10. London - 42 - 8,787,892
  11. Seoul - 38 - 9,857,426
  12. Taipei - 38 - 2,684,567
  13. Amman - 38 - 4,995,000
  14. Ankara - 37 - 5,270,575
  15. Santo Domingo - 36 - 2,581,827
  16. Abu dhabi - 35 - 2,502,715
  17. Warsaw - 35 - 1,753,977
  18. São Paulo - 34 - 12,106,920
  19. Tehran - 33 - 8,846,782
  20. Jakarta - 32 - 9,769,000

How the graph was created

The data underlying this graph was queried from Wikidata's Query Service in April 2018 using this SPARQL query and transformed to a graph structure in Python, you can find the code in this repository.

I rendered the graph in Gephi using the Force Atlas layout. The node colors represent the population values, the darker the larger the city. The size of the nodes represent the degree, i. e. the number of sister cities within this set of cities. The browser version is rendered with the JavaScript library sigma.js.

Visualization

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Visualization Poster

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Source Code

Check out the source code used to process the data and create the visualizations.

Code Repository

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