what makes a city rise — and what conditions push it vertical in office, residential, and infrastructure within a central business district.
Urbanicity is a sociology & urban-economics research project, with cartography and GIS at the working tip. We study skyscrapers, central business districts, datacenter buildouts, the death-and-reinvention of the American shopping center, and the disciplines that interpret how cities accrete value over time. This portal will surface our public-facing data, briefs, maps, and stock-comet research as it's ready to share.
we read the city as a stack of decisions — capital, land, power, labor, story.
the built environment
the physical stack we read for signal — masts and bases of the modern CBD.
marked with are live research surfaces.
structures
skyscrapers
the vertical push — what conditions actually produce it.
data centers
hyperscale pipeline, power partners, colocation, lifecycle stage.
office towers
class A/B/C inventory, conversion candidacy.
mixed-use
where residential laces back into the CBD.
retail lifecycle
death and reinvention of the American shopping center.
buildings
the whole-inventory ledger that everything else hangs from.
places
cities
population, NAICS profile, CBD identity, climate, growth.
central business districts
the dense vertical core, separated from suburb & periphery.
datacenter alleys
Ashburn, Mt Pleasant, Memphis, the Mississippi corridor, west TX.
power corridors
utilities, grids, nuclear restarts, gas-turbine fleets behind the buildout.
repurposed retail
former malls becoming DCs, warehouses, manufacturing, mixed-use.
international
comparison sets across global vertical-push events.
read the city
from the
capital first.
disciplines
urban economics
land rent, agglomeration, capital flows, factor concentration.
sociology
stratification, social networks, labor, neighborhood change.
GIS & cartography
spatial joins, choropleths, network analysis, leaflet maps.
demography
census tables, MSA + county business patterns, NAICS profiles.
theory & muses
classical and modern thinkers we consult when a question stalls.
instruments
stock comets
thematic baskets organized around a trigger event — head + tail.
datacenter buildout
62-member basket: hyperscalers, silicon, REITs, utilities, SMR.
spaceX dragon's wake
pre-IPO catalyst basket with cap-table and retail-proxy view.
anthropic / openAI
private AI lab spillover into public-market proxies.
census explorer
county business patterns + ACS tables, queryable.
join the research
Contributors, datasets, references, and good arguments are all welcome. Drop a note and tell us what city you're watching, what discipline you read from, and what question you're stuck on.