This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: For millennia, people have been drawn to cities for opportunities, jobs and the possibility of sharing a sidewalk with diverse and interesting groups of people. But does urban mixing, or the opportunity to meet people from different income levels, social and ethnic groups and backgrounds, still exist in modern global cities and other highly populated areas?
This is especially true in cities with legacies of strong ethnic neighborhoods, segregation and decades of suburbanization. New research from Northeastern University finds that mixing still occurs, but it depends less on where people live than on the places they visit each day. "Most of the mixing that people experience throughout the day is not because of where they live … [it's] because of what they do," said Esteban Moro, a professor of physics who leads the Social Urban Networks group at Northeastern's Network Science Institute.
The research was published in late July in Nature Cities. To investigate urban mixing, Moro examined travel surveys from Boston, Chicago, Hong Kong, London and São Paulo. Published between 2011 and 2018, the surveys interviewed more than 200,000 residents across the five cities and included information on an individual's home address, income, socioeconomic background and where they went throughout the day.
The researchers used the surveys to measure whether the study participants' daily activities included people with household incomes similar to or different from their own. They then measured the diversity of household incomes in each person's residential neighborhood using U.S. Both variables were measured on a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 representing no diversity in either daily travel or residential surroundings and 100 meaning all income groups in a population were encountered or located nearby.
Researchers then compared the two variables. Researchers found that the types of things people do account for more than half of the mixing an individual experiences throughout the day across all five cities. For example, Chicagoans experienced an estimated 12% more mixing during their daily travel than in their immediate neighborhoods.
That's not to say that every location visited during the day necessarily encouraged mixing or resulted in the same amount of mixing. There is likely less mixing of incomes among diners at an expensive restaurant than among visitors to a public library or gym, Moro said. In fact, the greatest mixing in Boston occurred at the city's Logan Airport, Moro said.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
