Sándor Juhász

selected publications

1. PNAS

   Urban highways are barriers to social ties

   Aiello, L. M., Vybornova, A., Juhász, S., Szell, M., and Bokányi, E.

   Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025

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   Urban highways are common, especially in the US, making cities more car-centric. They promise the annihilation of distance but obstruct pedestrian mobility, thus playing a key role in limiting social interactions locally. Although this limiting role is widely acknowledged in urban studies, the quantitative relationship between urban highways and social ties is barely tested. Here we define a Barrier Score that relates massive, geolocated online social network data to highways in the 50 largest US cities. At the unprecedented granularity of individual social ties, we show that urban highways are associated with decreased social connectivity. This barrier effect is especially strong for short distances and consistent with historical cases of highways that were built to purposefully disrupt or isolate Black neighborhoods. By combining spatial infrastructure with social tie data, our method adds a new dimension to demographic studies of social segregation. Our study can inform reparative planning for an evidence-based reduction of spatial inequality, and more generally, support a better integration of the social fabric in urban planning.

2. EPJ

   Amenity complexity and urban locations of socio-economic mixing

   Juhász, S., Pintér, G., Kovács, Á., Borza, E., Mónus, G., Lőrincz, L., and Lengyel, B.

   EPJ Data Science, 2023

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   Cities host diverse people and their mixing is the engine of prosperity. In turn, segregation and inequalities are common features of most cities and locations that enable the meeting of people with different socio-economic status are key for urban inclusion. In this study, we adopt the concept of economic complexity to quantify the sophistication of amenity supply at urban locations. We propose that neighborhood complexity and amenity complexity are connected to the ability of locations to attract diverse visitors from various socio-economic backgrounds across the city. We construct the measures of amenity complexity based on the local portfolio of diverse and non-ubiquitous amenities in Budapest, Hungary. Socio-economic mixing at visited third places is investigated by tracing the daily mobility of individuals and by characterizing their status by the real-estate price of their home locations. Results suggest that measures of ubiquity and diversity of amenities do not, but neighborhood complexity and amenity complexity are correlated with the urban centrality of locations. Urban centrality is a strong predictor of socio-economic mixing, but both neighborhood complexity and amenity complexity add further explanatory power to our models. Our work combines urban mobility data with economic complexity thinking to show that the diversity of non-ubiquitous amenities, central locations, and the potentials for socio-economic mixing are interrelated.

3. EPB

   Income-related spatial concentration of individual social capital in cities

   Kovács, Á., Juhász, S., Bokányi, E., and Lengyel, B.

   Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 2022

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   Social connections that span across diverse urban neighborhoods can support prosperity by mobilizing social capital. However, there is limited evidence on the spatial structure of individual social capital inside cities. This paper demonstrates that social capital measured by online social connections is spatially more concentrated for residents of lower-income neighborhoods than for residents of higher-income neighborhoods. We map the micro-geography of individual online social networks in the 50 largest metropolitan areas of the United States using a large-scale geolocalized Twitter dataset. We analyze the spatial dimension of individual social capital by the share of friends, closed triangles, and share of supported ties within circles of short distance radii (1, 3, 5, and 10 km) around users’ home location. We compare residents from below-median income neighborhoods with above-median income neighborhoods, and find that users living in relatively poorer neighborhoods have a significantly higher share of connections in close proximity. Moreover, their network is more cohesive and supported within a short distance from their home. These patterns prevail across the 50 largest US metropolitan areas with only a few exceptions. The found disparities in the micro-geographic concentration of social capital can feed segregation and income inequality within cities constraining social circles of low-income residents.