Segregation through the multiscalar lens

Olteanu, Mădălina; Randon‐Furling, Julien; Clark, William A. V.

doi:10.1073/pnas.1900192116

Cited by 42 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…The importance of considering the interaction of different classes due to urban mobility has recently received some attention [40,41,44,46,54,55,[60][61][62]. The methodology presented here brings together the long-lasting dichotomy between segregation and exposure [41,42,44,45] allowing for the quantification of both and, more interestingly, showing that segregation and exposure can appear at the same time in certain contexts. The method based on the passage times of random walkers that we have presented here can be considered a generalization of multi-scale and k-nearest neighbour approaches [41,42,45], which by definition can be applied to any type of network, either based on mobility or on any other subject such as transportation infrastructures.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diffusion segregation and the disproportionate incidence of COVID-19 in African American communities

Bassolas

Sousa

Nicosia

2021

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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One of the most concerning aspects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is that it disproportionately affects people from some specific ethnic and socio-economic minorities. In particular, since from the beginning of the pandemic it has been clear that people from Black and African American backgrounds seem to be hit especially hard by the virus, creating a substantial infection gap. The observed abnormal impact on these ethnic groups could probably be due to the co-occurrence of other known risk factors, including co-morbidity, poverty, level of education, access to healthcare, residential segregation and response to cures, although those factors do not seem able to explain fully and in depth the excess incidence of infections and deaths among African Americans. Here, we introduce the concept of diffusion segregation, that is the extent to which a given group of people is internally clustered or exposed to other groups, as a result of mobility and commuting habits. By analysing census and mobility data on major US cities, we found that the weekly excess COVID-19 incidence and mortality in African American communities at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic is significantly associated with their level of diffusion segregation. The results confirm that knowing where people commute to, rather than where they live, is potentially much more important to contain and curb the spreading of infectious diseases.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diffusion segregation and the disproportionate incidence of COVID-19 in African American communities

Bassolas

Sousa

Nicosia

2021

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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“…One of the most interesting aspects of the measures of heterogeneity, polarisation, and segregation that we have introduced in this work is that they take into account microscopic, meso-scopic and global relations among classes, due to the fact that in principle random walks integrate information about paths of all possible lengths. Another relevant property of the measures of segregation based on CMFPT is that they are non-parametric and correctly normalised with respect to a meaningful null-model, hence allowing us to compare on equal grounds the heterogeneity of class distributions in systems of different sizes, which is where most of the classical indices of segregation fail [32,46]. Even more importantly, the profiles of inter-class mean-first passage times are not symmetric with respect to classes, and provide fine-grained information about which classes are most responsible for the emergence of polarisation and heterogeneity.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Overall, our methodology based on the diffusion of random walks is not only a natural extension of the latter multiscalar approaches introduced to characterise residential segregation [46], but it also allows us to define a dynamical segregation that includes mobility into the analysis as it has been recently discussed for instance in Refs. [43,47].…”

Section: Residential and Dynamical Urban Economic Segregationmentioning

confidence: 99%

First-Passage Times to Quantify and Compare Structural Correlations and Heterogeneity in Complex Systems

Bassolas

Nicosia

2020

Preprint

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Virtually all the emergent properties of complex systems are rooted in the non-homogeneous nature of the behaviours of their elements and of the interactions among them. However, heterogeneity and correlations appear simultaneously at multiple relevant scales, making it hard to devise a systematic approach to quantify them. We develop here a scalable and non-parametric framework to characterise the presence of heterogeneity and correlations in a complex system, based on normalised mean first passage times between pre-assigned classes of nodes. We showcase a variety of concrete applications, including the quantification of polarisation in the UK Brexit referendum and the roll-call votes in the US Congress, the identification of key players in disease spreading, and the comparison of spatial segregation of US cities. These results show that the diffusion structure of a system is indeed a defining aspect of the complexity of its structure and function.

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“…Metrics of segregation can be zonebased or surface-based (O'Sullivan and Wong, 2007;Hong et al, 2014), the zone-based metrics are subject to the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) (Openshaw, 1984). Finally, metrics can be measured on a single scale or a multiple scales (Reardon et al, 2008;Lee et al, 2008;Östh et al, 2014;Hennerdal and Nielsen, 2017;Clark et al, 2015;Fowler, 2016;Olteanu et al, 2019). Software packages (Hong et al, 2014;Apparicio et al, 2014) have been developed to help researchers keep track of segregation metrics.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Racial landscapes – a pattern-based, zoneless method for analysis and visualization of racial topography

2020

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Quantifying and effectively communicating the spatio-racial distribution of urban residencies is important for taking the measure of how the multiracial society organizes itself in an urban environment. Most currently used approaches to this problem center around the calculation of segregation metrics; as such, they pertain to only a single pattern's feature and they lack a compelling visualization component. In this paper, we propose a reimagined approach to spatio-racial analysis based on the concept of landscape and landscape analysis. This approach unites quantification and visualization components of the analysis. It also quantifies the entire racial topography, not just segregation. Key novel concepts are the racial landscape (RL) and the exposure matrix. RL is a high-resolution grid in which each cell contains only inhabitants of a single race. The exposure matrix tabulates adjacencies between neighboring cells weighted by the local density of adjacent subpopulations; it provides a concise quantification of the RL pattern. Two information-theoretical metrics, derived from the exposure matrix, quantify diversity, and segregation of the RL. Segregation is quantified from cell adjacencies without the need for subdivision of the region of interest. Thus, the entire region, as well as its arbitrary subregions, are RLs quantified by their diversities and segregations. Coloring cells in RL according to combinations of their race and local densities provides a natural visualization of racial topography which serves as an "observation" that provides check on numerical metrics. The RL method is described and its application is demonstrated on Cook County, IL. An implementation of the RL method in R package accompanies this paper.

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Segregation through the multiscalar lens

Cited by 42 publications

References 28 publications

Diffusion segregation and the disproportionate incidence of COVID-19 in African American communities

Diffusion segregation and the disproportionate incidence of COVID-19 in African American communities

First-Passage Times to Quantify and Compare Structural Correlations and Heterogeneity in Complex Systems

Racial landscapes – a pattern-based, zoneless method for analysis and visualization of racial topography

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