Both human-made and natural supply systems, such as power grids and leaf venation networks, are built to operate reliably under changing external conditions. Many of these spatial networks exhibit community structures.

Here, we show that a relatively strong connectivity between the parts of a network can be used to define a different class of communities: dual communities.

We demonstrate that traditional and dual communities emerge naturally as two different phases of optimized network structures that are shaped by fluctuations and that they both suppress failure spreading, which underlines their importance in understanding the shape of real-world supply networks.

F. Kaiser, P. C. Böttcher, H. Ronellenfitsch, V. Latora, D. Witthaut, Dual communities in spatial networks, Nature Communications 13 (2022) 7479