Socioeconomic biases in urban mixing patterns of US metropolitan areas
Description
Urban areas serve as melting pots of people with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, who may not only be segregated but have characteristic mobility patterns in the city. While mobility is driven by individual needs and preferences, the specific choice of venues to visit is usually constrained by the socioeconomic status of people. The complex interplay between people and places they visit, given their personal attributes and homophily leaning, is a key mechanism behind the emergence of socioeconomic stratification patterns ultimately leading to urban segregation at large. Here we investigate mixing patterns of mobility in the twenty largest cities of the United States by coupling individual check-in data from the social location platform Foursquare with census information from the American Community Survey. We find strong signs of stratification indicating that people mostly visit places in their own socioeconomic class, occasionally visiting locations from higher classes. The intensity of this ‘upwards bias’ increases with socioeconomic status and correlates with standard measures of racial residential segregation. Our results suggest an even stronger socioeconomic segregation in individual mobility than one would expect from system-level distributions, shedding further light on uneven mobility mixing patterns in cities.
Show moreYear of publication
2022
Authors
Department of Computer Science
Gerardo Iniguez Gonzalez - Creator
Márton Karsai - Creator
Rafiazka Millanida Hilman - Creator
Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics - Contributor
Central European University - Contributor
figshare - Publisher
Other information
Fields of science
Computer and information sciences
Open access
Open
License
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)