Walkable social infrastructure, measured.

SocialWalk evaluates how structurally easy it is for 18–34 year olds to form repeat, in-person social connections in U.S. cities—based on walkable access to third places.

This is not a mental health metric. It’s a built-environment score for repeat interaction opportunity.

A society defaulting to bars, drugs, and apps is a failing society.

Rankings

Placeholder table for now. Next step is wiring this to your API.

# City State SocialWalk Score Walkable Social Density Affordability Population
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Later: link each city to /city.html?slug=cambridge_25.

Working Assumptions

Friendship = Consistency × Low-Cost × Non-Negative Exposure × Compatibility × Overlap × Mutual Investment × Time

Environmental factors (influenced by city structure) · Interpersonal factors (individual-dependent)

App-Based Matching ≈ Selection × Profile Optimization × Initial Attraction

SocialWalk measures the structural variables that increase consistency, reduce participation friction, and enable repeated in-person exposure.

Dunbar’s Number (~150 stable relationships)

Walkable Social Density = 0.65 z(SW18_34) + 0.25 z(venues_per_sq_km) − 0.20 z(ln(population))

affordability_score = −1 × z( ln((median_gross_rent × 12) / median_household_income) )

SocialWalk Score = Walkable Social Density + (0.25 × affordability_score)

All components are standardized across 300 U.S. cities before combination.

Method (short version)

  • SocialWalk component: walkable access to repeat-interaction venues (z-scored across 300 cities).
  • Affordability component: rent-to-income using ACS median gross rent and median household income.
  • Headline score: SocialWalk + a smaller affordability adjustment.

Context

“Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.”
— Jane Jacobs
In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam documents a marked decline in American social capital and finds that commute time is more predictive than almost any other variable in determining civic engagement. He writes that “each ten additional minutes in daily commuting time cuts involvement in community affairs by ten percent — fewer public meetings attended, fewer committees chaired, fewer petitions signed, fewer church services attended, and so on.”
— Robert Putnam

About

SocialWalk uses OpenStreetMap place tags, AI classification into repeat-interaction venue categories, and spatial analysis to compute city-level accessibility and density.