Behaviour-based dependency networks between places shape urban economic resilience

Takahiro Yabe (), Bernardo García Bulle Bueno, Morgan R. Frank, Alex Pentland and Esteban Moro ()
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Takahiro Yabe: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Bernardo García Bulle Bueno: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Morgan R. Frank: University of Pittsburgh
Alex Pentland: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Esteban Moro: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Nature Human Behaviour, 2025, vol. 9, issue 3, 496-506

Abstract: Abstract Disruptions, such as closures of businesses during pandemics, not only affect businesses and amenities directly but also influence how people move, spreading the impact to other businesses and increasing the overall economic shock. However, it is unclear how much businesses depend on each other during disruptions. Leveraging human mobility data and same-day visits in five US cities, we quantify dependencies between points of interest encompassing businesses, stores and amenities. We find that dependency networks computed from human mobility exhibit significantly higher rates of long-distance connections and biases towards specific pairs of point-of-interest categories. We show that using behaviour-based dependency relationships improves the predictability of business resilience during shocks by around 40% compared with distance-based models, and that neglecting behaviour-based dependencies can lead to underestimation of the spatial cascades of disruptions. Our findings underscore the importance of measuring complex relationships in patterns of human mobility to foster urban economic resilience to shocks.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-02072-7

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