Related papers: Measuring and Modeling Neighborhoods
Understanding how local environments influence individual behaviors, such as voting patterns or suicidal tendencies, is crucial in social science to reveal and reduce spatial disparities and promote social well-being. With the increasing…
Many areas of the world are without basic information on the socioeconomic well-being of the residing population due to limitations in existing data collection methods. Overhead images obtained remotely, such as from satellite or aircraft,…
In the computational study of political redistricting, feasibility necessitates the use of a discretization of regions such as states, counties, and towns. In nearly all cases, researchers use a dual graph, whose vertices represent small…
A social system is susceptible to perturbation when its collective properties depend sensitively on a few pivotal components. Using the information geometry of minimal models from statistical physics, we develop an approach to identify…
Sociologists associate the spatial variation of crime within an urban setting, with the concept of collective efficacy. The collective efficacy of a neighborhood is defined as social cohesion among neighbors combined with their willingness…
The interactions of individuals with city neighbourhoods is determined, in part, by the perceived quality of urban environments. Perceived neighbourhood quality is a core component of urban vitality, influencing social cohesion, sense of…
Neighborhood gentrification plays a significant role in shaping the social and economic well-being of both individuals and communities at large. While some efforts have been made to detect gentrification in cities, existing approaches rely…
The outcome of elections is strongly dependent on the districting choices, making thus possible (and frequent) the gerrymandering phenomenon, i.e.\ politicians suitably changing the shape of electoral districts in order to win the…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…
Urban research has long recognized that neighbourhoods are dynamic and relational. However, lack of data, methodologies, and computer processing power have hampered a formal quantitative examination of neighbourhood relational dynamics. To…
Quantifying the population density of an urban area is a fraught issue. Measures of density are often defined differently from place to place or applied inconsistently, and arguments abound over just how much of the land surrounding a city…
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…
Spectral analysis of neighborhood graphs is one of the most widely used techniques for exploratory data analysis, with applications ranging from machine learning to social sciences. In such applications, it is typical to first encode…
Surveys have recently gained popularity as a tool to study large language models. By comparing survey responses of models to those of human reference populations, researchers aim to infer the demographics, political opinions, or values best…
Major decisions from governments and other large organizations rely on measurements of the populace's well-being, but making such measurements at a broad scale is expensive and thus infrequent in much of the developing world. We propose an…
What people choose to see, like, or remember is of profound interest to city planners and architects. Previous research suggests what people are more likely to store in their memory - buildings with dominant shapes and bright colors,…
Algorithmic and statistical approaches to congressional redistricting are becoming increasingly valuable tools in courts and redistricting commissions for quantifying gerrymandering in the United States. While there is existing literature…
Fine resolution estimates of demographic and socioeconomic attributes are crucial for planning and policy development. While several efforts have been made to produce fine-scale gridded population estimates, socioeconomic features are…
City council meetings are vital sites for civic participation where the public can speak directly to their local government. By addressing city officials and calling on them to take action, public commenters can potentially influence policy…
How to assess the potential of liking a city or a neighborhood before ever having been there. The concept of urban quality has until now pertained to global city ranking, where cities are evaluated under a grid of given parameters, or…