Foursquare Analysis Identifies Six Venue Popularity Shapes in London and Barcelona, No Recovery Trajectories
Preprint using 5.5 years of Foursquare data finds six shared venue popularity trajectories in two European cities, none of them recovery-shaped. Neighbourhood deprivation and density do not predict trajectory membership, but spatial clustering of identical shapes occurs at street scale. Results indicate vibrancy is generated locally and shaped by historical context.
Researchers clustered normalized weekly check-in series and extracted six shapes: Fall, Rise, Rise & Fall, Steady, Ephemeral, and Underdogs. The same six shapes appeared independently in both cities. No U-shaped recovery cluster emerged despite the long observation window. Proximity analysis showed same-shape venues clustered at 200-600 m scales, exceeding random expectation.
The absence of recovery trajectories challenges the assumption that neighbourhood-level gentrification automatically rescues struggling venues. Qualitative comparison of one rising London district and one declining Barcelona district found comparable deprivation yet divergent outcomes tied to specific historical redevelopment sequences rather than static census variables. This points to block-scale path dependence.
The finding aligns with earlier mobility studies showing venue success depends more on local mixing patterns than aggregate population metrics. It also extends work on retail life cycles by demonstrating that early trajectory segments are the most diagnostic for classification.
Future work could test whether these shapes replicate in North American or Asian cities and whether policy interventions can shift venues between shapes after the first 18 months.
Yeung et al.: Within 24 months of publication, at least two city-planning agencies will publish open datasets testing whether the six-shape taxonomy holds in a third European city with N>5000 venues.
Sources (2)
- [1]Primary Source(https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18917)
- [2]Supporting Source(https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-45811-7)