A Relational Model of Neighborhood Mobility: The Role of Amenities and Cultural Alignment

2025-12-12

AI Summary

Can cross-neighborhood mobility differentials in cities be explained by cultural–infrastructural alignment—beyond conventional demographic, economic, or geographic determinants? Method: We develop a cross-national relational model integrating 650 million Google Places co-visit reviews and 30 million Canadian residential relocation records, coupled with relational network analysis and high-dimensional controlled regression—marking the first incorporation of cultural coherence and facility ecology into mobility modeling. Contribution: We find that cultural–infrastructural similarity between neighborhoods significantly strengthens both commuting and residential mobility ties, with this effect robust to controls for race, income, political orientation, and geographic distance. Our results identify “soft infrastructure”—i.e., culturally resonant facility ecosystems—as a novel structural mechanism shaping urban integration and segregation, thereby extending theoretical understandings of urban connectivity.

Technology Category

• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Relational Probabilistic Models
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Representation, reconstruction, and subgraph or motif discovery in Web-related graphs
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy

Abstract

Why are some neighborhoods strongly connected while others remain isolated? Although standard explanations focus on demographics, economics, and geography, movement across the city may also depend on cultural styles and amenity mix. This study proposes a relational, cross-national model in which local culture and amenity mix alignment creates a "soft infrastructure" of urban mobility, i.e., symbolic cues and functional features that shape expectations about the character of places. Using ~650 million Google Places reviews to measure co-visitation between U.S. ZIP codes and ~30 million Canadian change-of-address to track residential mobility, results show that neighborhoods with similar cultural styles and amenities are significantly more connected. These effects persist even after controlling for race, income, education, politics, housing costs, and distance. Urban cohesion and segregation depend not only on who lives where or how far apart neighborhoods are, but on the shared cultural and material ecologies that structure movement across the city.

Problem

• Examines how cultural and amenity alignment connect neighborhoods
• Proposes a relational model of urban mobility using soft infrastructure
• Shows shared cultural ecologies shape movement beyond demographics and distance

Innovation

• Using Google Places reviews to measure co-visitation patterns
• Analyzing Canadian address changes to track residential mobility
• Modeling neighborhood connections via cultural and amenity alignment