Abstract
In this paper we try to understand how racial segregation of the geographic spaces of three major US cities (New York, Los Angeles and Chicago) affect the mobility patterns of people living in them. Collecting over 75 million geo-tagged tweets from these cities during a period of one year beginning October 2012 we identified home locations for over 30,000 distinct users, and prepared models of travel patterns for each of them. Dividing the cities’ geographic boundary into census tracts and grouping them according to racial segregation information we try to understand how the mobility of users living within an area of a particular predominant race correlate to those living in areas of similar race, and to those of a different race. While these cities still remain to be vastly segregated in the 2010 census data, we observe a compelling amount of deviation in travel patterns when compared to artificially generated ideal mobility. A common trend for all races is to visit areas populated by similar race more often. Also, blacks, Asians and Hispanics tend to travel less often to predominantly white census tracts, and similarly predominantly black tracts are less visited by other races.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Denton, N.A., Massey, D.S.: Residential segregation of blacks, hispanics, and asians by socioeconomic status and generation. Social Science Quarterly 69(4), 797–817 (1988)
Glaeser, E.L., Vigdor, J.L.: Racial segregation in the 2000 census: Promising news. Brookings Institution, Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy (2001)
Logan, J.R., Stults, B.J., Farley, R.: Segregation of minorities in the metropolis: Two decades of change. Demography 41(1), 1–22 (2004)
Massey, D.S., Denton, N.A.: The dimensions of residential segregation. Social Forces 67(2), 281–315 (1988)
Massey, D.S., Denton, N.A.: Trends in the residential segregation of blacks, hispanics, and asians: 1970-1980. American Sociological Review, 802–825 (1987)
Clark, W.A.: Residential preferences and neighborhood racial segregation: A test of the schelling segregation model. Demography 28(1), 1–19 (1991)
Bayer, P., McMillan, R., Rueben, K.S.: What drives racial segregation? new evidence using census microdata. Journal of Urban Economics 56(3), 514–535 (2004)
Peterson, R.D., Krivo, L.J.: Racial segregation and black urban homicide. Social Forces 71(4), 1001–1026 (1993)
Card, D., Rothstein, J.: Racial segregation and the black–white test score gap. Journal of Public Economics 91(11), 2158–2184 (2007)
Brockmann, D., Hufnagel, L., Geisel, T.: The scaling laws of human travel. Nature 439(7075), 462–465 (2006)
Gonzalez, M.C., Hidalgo, C.A., Barabasi, A.L.: Understanding individual human mobility patterns. Nature 453(7196), 779–782 (2008)
Sakaki, T., Okazaki, M., Matsuo, Y.: Earthquake shakes twitter users: real-time event detection by social sensors. In: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 851–860. ACM (2010)
Bora, N., Zaytsev, V., Chang, Y.H., Maheswaran, R.: Gang networks, neighborhoods and holidays: Spatiotemporal patterns in social media. In: 2013 ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Computing (2013)
Ester, M., Kriegel, H.P., Sander, J., Xu, X.: A density-based algorithm for discovering clusters in large spatial databases with noise, Kdd (1996)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bora, N., Chang, YH., Maheswaran, R. (2014). Mobility Patterns and User Dynamics in Racially Segregated Geographies of US Cities. In: Kennedy, W.G., Agarwal, N., Yang, S.J. (eds) Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction. SBP 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8393. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05579-4_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05579-4_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-05578-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-05579-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)