Beyond city size : characterizing and predicting the location of urban amenities

Abstract

Intercity studies have shown that a city's characteristics -ranging from infrastructure to crime-scale as a power of its population. These studies, however, have not been extended to the intra-city scale, leaving open the question of how urban characteristics are distributed within a city. Here we study the spatial organization of one important urban characteristic: its amenities, such as restaurants, cafes, and libraries. We use a dataset summarizing the position of more than 1.2 million amenities disaggregated into 74 distinct categories and covering 47 U.S. cities to show that: (i) the spatial distribution of amenities within a city is characterized by dense agglomerations of amenities (which we call micro-clusters), (ii) that unlike in the intercity case, size is a poor predictor of the amenities of each type that locate in each micro-cluster, and (iii) that the number of amenities of each type in a micro-cluster is better predicted using information on the collocation of amenities observed across all micro-clusters than using the micro-cluster's size. Finally, we use these findings to create a recommendation algorithm that suggests amenities that are missing in a micro-cluster and can inform the efforts of developers and planners looking to construct and regulate the development of new and existing neighborhoods.