Measuring urban segregation based on individuals’ daily activity patterns: A multidimensional approach

Abstract

This paper develops a methodology to measure urban segregation based on individuals’ sociospatial experience of daily life. Since segregation can be considered as the isolation of people from those unlike themselves, its degree increases with the similarity in ethnicity, economic status, or other sociodemographic dimensions of interest between individuals and people who they are exposed to in their daily usage of urban space. Based on this perspective, we propose a regression estimator that measures segregation by assessing similarity or likeness between people and the social environments they experience in daily activity spaces. Compared to traditional segregation measures, the proposed estimator is not restricted to measuring residential segregation, but recognizes and assesses segregation as a dynamic process that unfolds in the daily life routines of individuals in a society and depends on the different ways individuals or social groups use urban space. It can be applied to various segregation factors, categorical or continuous, as well as to examine their interactions in a society. An empirical study in Hong Kong is used to demonstrate the proposed approach.

Urban segregation: contexts, domains, dimensions and approaches

“…As has already been addressed in the preceding section, Kwan (2009;, for instance, supports the measurement of exposure to others at the individual level, especially in order to study segregation in activity spaces. Li and Wang (2017) and Wang et al (2012) have measured activity space segregation in terms of the correlation between the social characteristics of individuals and those of their daily activity spaces.…”

Space–time prism bounds of activity programs: a goal-directed search in multi-state supernetworks

“…Second, besides activity-travel time budget, it is worthwhile to include monetary cost budget in the model framework because much of the daily travel and activity participation involve monetary expenses. While it is not to claim that travel does not, activity participation cost is often the key determinant of accessibility for certain social groups (Li and Wang 2017). With the presence of cost budget, dual frontiers are required to be searched.…”

Networks of (Dis)connection: Mobility Practices, Tertiary Streets, and Sectarian Divisions in North Belfast

“…Many segregation studies use predefined areas such as census boundaries to define neighborhoods and measure the nature and extent of urban segregation (Omer and Benenson 2002;Noonan 2005;Lloyd 2010;Wong and Shaw 2011;Weaver 2015;Li and Wang 2017;Merrilees et al 2017). Grannis (2009) stressed that although boundaries defined by census or other administrative agencies generate statistical units that are useful for summarizing data, they do not delineate neighborhoods in a socially meaningful way or account for the potential for residents to interact.…”

“…Regardless of how neighborhoods are defined, many segregation studies focus exclusively on residential segregation, often using census data to define the ethnic mix of the residential population (Grannis 1998;Hughes et al 2007;Lloyd and Shuttleworth 2012;Bruch 2014). Although some studies have measured use of space through activity diaries (Wong and Shaw 2011;Farber et al 2013;Li and Wang 2017) or from mobile phone usage (Silm and Ahas 2014; J€ arv et al 2015), few studies have used GPS tracking for understanding the impact of segregation on mobility (Palmer et al 2013;Roulston et al 2017). GPS tracks potentially identify locations that people visit when not at home, as well as the routes people take to reach these locations.…”