The time geography of segregation during working hours

Abstract

Understanding segregation is essential to develop planning tools for building more inclusive cities. Theoretically, segregation at the work place has been described as lower compared to residential segregation given the importance of skill complementarity among other productive factors shaping the economies of cities. This paper tackles segregation during working hours from a dynamical perspective by focusing on the movement of urbanites across the city. In contrast to measuring residential patterns of segregation, we used mobile phone data to infer home-work trajectory net- works and apply a community detection algorithm to the example city of Santiago, Chile. We then describe qualitatively and quantitatively outlined communities, in terms of their socio eco- nomic composition. We then evaluate segregation for each of these communities as the probability that a person from a specific community will interact with a co-worker from the same commu- nity. Finally, we compare these results with simulations where a new work location is set for each real user, following the empirical probability distributions of home-work distances and angles of direction for each community. Methodologically, this study shows that segregation during working hours for Santiago is unexpectedly high for most of the city with the exception of its central and business district. In fact, the only community that is not statistically segregated corresponds to the downtown area of Santiago, described as a zone of encounter and integration across the city.

arXiv comment17 pages, 4 figures and 3 tables

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Entropy as a measure of attractiveness and socioeconomic complexity in Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area
• Mobile phone indicators and their relation to the socioeconomic organisation of cities
• City limits in the age of smartphones and urban scaling
• Uncovering the socioeconomic structure of spatial and social interactions in cities
• Public disorder and transport networks in the Latin American Context