On New York University Week: Your behavior can affect the city you live in.
Takahiro Yabe, assistant professor in the department of technology management and innovation and the Center for Urban Science and Progress, details the relationship.
Takahiro Yabe is an Assistant Professor at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering Department of Technology Management and Innovation and the Center for Urban Science + Progress. His research focuses on computational social science and network science approaches to model the resilience of cities to disasters, pandemics, and disruptive mobility technology, and has been published in journals including Nature Human Behaviour, PNAS, Nature Communications, and Nature Machine Intelligence. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Institute of Data, Systems and Society (IDSS) and the MIT Media Lab. He obtained his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 2021, and his MS and BS from the University of Tokyo in 2017 and 2015, respectively.
Your Behavior Affects Your City
When your favorite coffee shop closes or your office goes fully remote, you might think the impact stays local. But our research shows that economic disruptions create ripple effects that stretch much farther than anyone imagined.
We analyzed anonymous mobile phone data from over a million devices across five major cities including New York City using AI algorithms to understand how people actually move between businesses throughout the day. Using this approach we created detailed “dependency networks” showing how different establishments rely on each other’s customer base.
What we discovered was remarkable. Traditional models assumed businesses mainly affected their immediate neighbors, like a coffee shop next to a closed office building. But our analysis revealed the reality is far more complex. Airports significantly impact businesses up to 2.5 kilometers away. Large retail stores and colleges influence establishments within a 1.5-kilometer radius.
Perhaps most surprisingly, arts venues, restaurants, and service businesses can experience substantial impacts even when they’re far from the source of disruption. Using our “dependency networks” approach, our predictions of business resilience during disruptions became 40 percent more accurate than traditional models.
This AI-driven network approach reveals that cities function as interconnected webs. Urban planners can now use our tools to simulate interventions like congestion pricing or new infrastructure to anticipate these ripple effects throughout the city, to design more resilient urban communities and economies.
Read More:
[NYU Tandon School of Engineering] – Research reveals economic ripple effects of business closures, remote work and other disruptions
Invisible Urban Dependencies
[Nature] – Behaviour-based dependency networks between places shape urban economic resilience
