Modelling the Spatial Dynamics of Culture Spreading in the Presence of Cultural Strongholds

Cultural competition has throughout our history shaped and reshaped the geography of boundaries between humans. Language and culture are intimately connected and linguists often use distinctive keywords to quantify the dynamics of information spreading in societies harbouring strong culture centres. One prominent example, which is addressed here, is Kyoto's historical impact on Japanese culture. We construct a first minimal model, based on shared properties of linguistic maps, to address the interplay between information flow and geography. In particular, we show that spreading of information over Japan in the pre-modern time can be described as a Eden growth process, with noise levels corresponding to coherent spatial patches of sizes given by a single days walk, and with patch-to-patch communication time comparable to the time between human generations.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Proposing new measures of employment deconcentration and spatial dispersion across metropolitan areas in the US

A well-known challenge is measuring employment concentration across metropolitan areas and analysing the evolving spatial structure. We introduce a new approach that avoids identifying “job centres” and conceptualizes the distribution of employment based on two dimensions: (1) employment deconcentration; and (2) spatial dispersion of high employment locations. We apply this framework to study 329 US metropolitan regions based on 1 sq km. grid cells. We find diverse trajectories of metropolitan restructuring between 2000 and 2010, and substantial variation across regions in employment concentration. The new framework enables researchers to compare metropolitan regions to gain insights into the dynamic nature of metropolitan spatial structure