2026-10-15

7 arXiv categories· 96 journals· 3661 candidates — 2 worth your time· 47 without an open abstract

Headline

Venue popularity trajectories in European cities, and Brazilian city-size distributions

Today, together

tag shift
no tag ran above its 30-day average
on the same shoulders
no foundation work was cited by four of the day's papers counted over the 45 of this day's 49 named papers whose reference lists we have — standing on the same older work is not the same as being about the same thing
first appearance
no institution here was new to the last 125 days none of them on a paper we published in the 125 days before this issue

Two counts, not one counted twice: every row here but “on the same shoulders” counts the papers published above, and that one counts every paper this day named — those and the ones under Also published today, whose abstracts we could not read.

preprint

Wang Ngai Yeung, Lakmal Meegahapola, Daniele Quercia, et al.
arXiv physics.soc-ph

London · Barcelona

Popularity Trajectories and Mixing Patterns of Urban Venues in Two European Cities

Using 5.5 years of Foursquare data covering roughly 10,000 venues in London and Barcelona, six distinct popularity trajectories emerged across both locations: Fall, Rise, Rise & Fall, Steady, Ephemeral, and Underdogs. Deprivation and population density fail to predict which trajectory a venue follows, but venues sharing the same trajectory cluster spatially within 200 to 600 meters. A qualitative comparison of gentrifying districts in both cities further showed that divergent neighborhood histories produce contrasting venue performance patterns despite similar socioeconomic profiles.

Why it matters — This refutes the common assumption that neighborhood-level wealth and demographic density govern individual venue success, showing instead that commercial vitality is driven by block-level spatial proximity and localized gentrification histories.

Caveat: The study relies on Foursquare location check-in data, which reflects the behavior of a self-selected platform user base rather than total foot traffic.

arXiv · pdf

preprint

Sharon Teles
arXiv physics.soc-ph

census data

The Gompertz-Zipf city size distribution and urban allometry

The study modeled Brazilian city size distributions using IBGE census records from 1872 to 2022, combining a Gompertz distribution for smaller towns and a Zipf power law for larger cities above a population threshold between 20,216 and 102,857. Analysis reveals that population inequality grew significantly over 150 years, with the Gini index rising from 0.439 to 0.733 and the Zipf exponent dropping from 3.61 to 2.28, while 2022 urban allometric scaling yielded a sublinear exponent of b=0.835 for built-up urbanized area against total population.

Why it matters — Long-term empirical tracking confirms that urban allometric scaling governs built footprint rather than administrative boundaries, while proving that population concentration in upper-tier cities has intensified continually across a 150-year national urbanization process.

Caveat: The allometric scaling relationships were evaluated using only the 2022 census data rather than the full historical series.

arXiv · pdf

Also published today

These appeared today in journals we track. Their abstracts are not openly available, so we cannot summarise them.