Related papers: The New Urban Success: How Culture Pays
Urban inequality is a major challenge for cities in the 21st century. This inequality is reflected in the spatial income structure of cities which evolves in time through various processes. Gentrification is a well-known illustration of…
Estimating the capabilities, or inputs of production, that drive and constrain the economic development of urban areas has remained a challenging goal. We posit that capabilities are instantiated in the complexity and sophistication of…
Being able to assess the impact of government-led investment onto socio-economic indicators in cities has long been an important target of urban planning. However, due to the lack of large-scale data with a fine spatio-temporal resolution,…
Understanding the collective dynamics behind the success of ideas, products, behaviors, and social actors is critical for decision-making across diverse contexts, including hiring, funding, career choices, and the design of interventions…
Consumption practices are determined by a combination of economic, social, and cultural forces. We posit that lower economic constraints leave more room to diversify consumption along cultural and social aspects in the form of omnivorous or…
Throughout history, maps have been used as a tool to explore cities. They visualize a city's urban fabric through its streets, buildings, and points of interest. Besides purely navigation purposes, street names also reflect a city's culture…
Urban income segregation is a widespread phenomenon that challenges societies across the globe. Classical studies on segregation have largely focused on the geographic distribution of residential neighborhoods rather than on patterns of…
Nowadays, 23% of the world population lives in multi-million cities. In these metropolises, criminal activity is much higher and violent than in either small cities or rural areas. Thus, understanding what factors influence urban crime in…
Taking advantage of nearly 4 million transition records for three years in London from a popular location-based social network service, Foursquare, we study how to track the impact and measure the effectiveness of cultural investment in…
Understanding the dynamics of opinions, preferences and of culture as whole requires more use of empirical data than has been done so far. It is clear that an important role in driving this dynamics is played by social influence, which is…
Culture is core to human civilization, and is essential for human intellectual achievements in social context. Culture also influences how humans work together, perform particular task and overall lifestyle and dealing with other groups of…
It is commonly believed that patterns of social ties affect individuals' economic status. Here, we translate this concept into an operational definition at the network level, which allows us to infer the economic wellbeing of individuals…
Cities are characterized by the coexistence of general aggregate patterns, along with many local variations. This poses challenges for analyses of urban phenomena, which tend to be either too aggregated or too local, depending on the…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
While much effort has been devoted to understand the role of intra-urban characteristics on sustainability and growth, much remains to be understood about the effect of inter-urban interactions and the role cities have in determining each…
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
Scientific studies of society increasingly rely on digital traces produced by various aspects of human activity. In this paper, we use a relatively unexplored source of data, anonymized records of bank card transactions collected in Spain…
Understanding the forces governing human behavior and social dynamics is a challenging problem. Individuals' decisions and actions are affected by interlaced factors, such as physical location, homophily, and social ties. In this paper, we…
Substantial empirical research has shown that the level of individualism vs. collectivism is one of the most critical and important determinants of societal traits, such as economic growth, economic institutions and health conditions. But…
Social interactions and personal tastes shape our consumption behavior of cultural products. In this study, we present a computational model of a cultural market and we aim to analyze the behavior of the consumer population as an emergent…