This review outlines approaches to explanations of crime that incorporate the concept of human mobility—or the patterns of movement throughout space of individuals or populations in the context of everyday routines—with a focus on novel strategies for the collection of geographically referenced data on mobility patterns. We identify three approaches to understanding mobility–crime linkages: Place and neighborhood approaches characterize local spatial units of analysis of varying size with respect to the intersection in space and time of potential offenders, victims, and guardians. Person-centered approaches emphasize the spatial trajectories of individuals and person–place interactions that influence crime risk. Ecological network approaches consider links between persons or collectivities based on shared activity locations, capturing influences of broader systems of interconnection on spatial- and individual-level variation in crime. We review data collection strategies for the measurement of mobility across these approaches, considering both the challenges and promise of mobility-based research for criminology. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 4 is January 13, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

The inadequacies of residential census geography in capturing urban residents’ routine exposures have motivated efforts to more directly measure residents’ activity spaces. In turn, insights regarding urban activity patterns have been used to motivate alternative residential neighbourhood measurement strategies incorporating dimensions of activity space in the form of egocentric neighbourhoods – measurement approaches that place individuals at the centre of their own residential neighbourhood units. Unexamined, however, is the extent to which the boundaries of residents’ own self-defined residential neighbourhoods compare with census-based and egocentric neighbourhood measurement approaches in aligning with residents’ routine activity locations. We first assess this question, examining whether the boundaries of residents’ self-defined residential neighbourhoods are in closer proximity to the coordinates of a range of activity location types than are the boundaries of their census and egocentric residential neighbourhood measurement approaches. We find little evidence that egocentric or, crucially, self-defined residential neighbourhoods better align with activity locations, suggesting a division in residents’ activity locations and conceptions of their residential neighbourhoods. We then examine opposing hypotheses about how self-defined residential neighbourhoods and census tracts compare in socioeconomic and racial composition. Overall, our findings suggest that residents bound less segregated neighbourhoods than those produced by census geography, but self-defined residential neighbourhoods still reflect a preference towards homophily when considering areas beyond the immediate environment of their residence. These findings underscore the significance of individuals’ conceptions of residential neighbourhoods to understanding and measuring urban social processes such as residential segregation and social disorganisation.

We expand on existing understandings of health disparities among middle-class African-Americans by examining how the postsecondary educational context gives rise to the unequal distribution of health. We use panel data (1994-2009) from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to estimate if the risk of developing metabolic syndrome by midlife significantly differs for African-Americans who attended Historically Black College or Universities (HBCUs) vs. predominantly White institutions (PWIs). We find that HBCU enrollment is associated with a 35% reduction in the odds of metabolic syndrome. Furthermore, we demonstrate that HBCU attendees who grew up in more segregated environments experienced the greatest reductions in the likelihood of developing metabolic syndrome. Our results underscore the important role that HBCUs play in the lives of African-Americans and suggest their impacts go far beyond traditional benchmarks of socioeconomic achievement to include key health outcomes.

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In the United States, Black youth tend to grow up in remarkably less resourced neighborhoods than White youth. This study investigates whether and to what extent Black youth are moreover exposed to less resourced activity spaces beyond the home. We draw on GPS data from a large sample of urban youth in the Columbus, Ohio–based Adolescent Health and Development in Context study (2014–2016) to examine to what extent Black youth experience nontrivial, disproportionate levels of exposure to more disadvantaged and segregated contexts in their daily routines compared with similarly residentially situated White youth. Specifically, we estimate Black–White differences in nonhome exposure to concentrated disadvantage, racial segregation, collective efficacy, and violent crime. We find that Black youths' activity spaces have substantially higher rates of racial segregation and violent crime than those of White youth, and substantially lower levels of collective efficacy—even after accounting for a host of individual- and home neighborhood–level characteristics. We find more modest evidence of differences in exposure to socioeconomic disadvantage. These findings have important implications for neighborhood-centered interventions focused on youth well-being and the contextual effects and segregation literatures more generally.