Suchergebnisse

Urban planners have a stake in preserving restaurants that are unique to local areas in order to cultivate a distinctive, authentic landscape. Yet, over time, chain restaurants (i.e. franchises) have largely replaced independently owned restaurants, creating a landscape of placelessness. In this research, we explored which (types of) locales have an independent food culture and which resemble McCities: foodscapes where the food offerings can be found just as easily in one place as in many other (often distant) places. We used a dataset of nearly 800,000 independent and chain restaurants for the Continental United States and defined a chain restaurant using multiple methods. We performed a descriptive analysis of chainness (a value indicating the likelihood of finding the same venue elsewhere) prevalence at the urban area and metropolitan area levels. We identified socioeconomic and infrastructural factors that correlate with high or low chainness using random forest and linear regression models. We found that car-dependency, low walkability, high percentage voters for Donald Trump (2016), concentrations of college-age students, and nearness to highways were associated with high rates of chainness. These high chainness McCities are prevalent in the Midwestern and the Southeastern United States. Independent restaurants were associated with dense pedestrian-friendly environments, highly educated populations, wealthy populations, racially diverse neighborhoods, and tourist areas. Low chainness was also associated with East and West Coast cities. These findings, paired with the contribution of methods that quantify chainness, open new pathways for measuring landscapes through the lens of unique services and retail offerings.

Individuals connect to sets of places through travel, migration, telecommunications, and social interactions. This set of multiplex network connections comprises an individual's "extensibility," a human geography term that qualifies one's geographic reach as locally‐focused or globally extensible. Here we ask: Are there clear signals of global vs. local extensibility? If so, what demographic and social life factors correlate with each type of pattern? To answer these questions, we use data from the Neighborhood Connectivity Survey conducted in Akron, Ohio, State College, Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (global sample N = 950; in model n = 903). Based on the location of a variety of connections (travel, phone call patterns, locations of family, migration, etc.), we found that individuals fell into one of four different typologies: (a) hyperlocal, (b) metropolitan, (c) mixed‐many, and (d) regional‐few. We tested whether individuals in each typology had different levels of local social support and different sociodemographic characteristics. We found that respondents who are white, married, and have higher educational attainment are significantly associated with more connections to a wider variety of places (more global connections), while respondents who are Black/African American, single, and with a high school level educational attainment (or lower) have more local social and spatial ties. Accordingly, the "urban poor" may be limited in their ability to interact with a variety of places (yielding a wide set of geographic experiences and influences), suggesting that wide extensibility may be a mark of privileged circumstances and heightened agency.