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

TL;DR

This paper introduces a relational model showing that neighborhoods with similar cultural styles and amenities are more connected, influencing urban mobility and segregation beyond demographics and geography.

Contribution

It presents a novel cross-national model linking cultural and amenity alignment to neighborhood connectivity, supported by large-scale data analysis.

Findings

Neighborhoods with similar cultures and amenities are more connected.

Cultural and amenity alignment influences mobility beyond race, income, and geography.

Shared cultural and material ecologies shape urban cohesion and segregation.

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.