New preprint out with Wang Ngai Yeung, Lakmal Meegahapola, and Daniele Quercia!
Two cafes on the same street can end up on opposite paths - one builds a following for a decade, the other quietly empties out. The usual explanation is the neighbourhood: how wealthy the area is, how many people live there. We wanted to know if that's actually true.
This is a collaboration with Nokia Bell Labs in Cambridge, where Wang Ngai (Justin) did a research visit in 2025. Using 5.5 years of Foursquare data for about 10,000 venues each in London and Barcelona, we tracked every restaurant, shop, bar and park's popularity over time and asked what shapes those trajectories take, and what predicts them.
What we find:
- Venue popularity falls into six recurring shapes in both cities: Fall, Rise, Rise & Fall, Steady, Ephemeral (an early hit that fades fast), and Underdogs (a slow starter that gains popularity late). No shape ever recovers after a sustained decline - a venue that falls tends to keep falling.
- A neighbourhood's wealth and population density barely predict which shape a venue follows. What does predict it is what's happening to the venues right around it - a venue's own trajectory mirrors its neighbours', a spillover effect visible at 200-600 metres, not at the scale of the wider neighbourhood.
- Knowing which shape a venue is on isn't much use unless you can tell early. Some shapes (Fall, Ephemeral) are obvious almost immediately; others (Rise, Underdogs) stay indistinguishable until very late in their lifespan, since they start out looking identical to other shapes.
- A close qualitative look at Hackney (London) and Ciutat Vella (Barcelona) - both deprived, dense, and heavily gentrified - shows the same socioeconomic conditions producing completely different venue trajectories, depending on the type and timing of gentrification (see the maps above - venue colours mark trajectory shape).
Yeung, W.N., Meegahapola, L., Quercia, D., & Di Clemente, R. (2026). Popularity Trajectories and Mixing Patterns of Urban Venues in Two European Cities. arXiv:2610.18917. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18917