COVID-19 confines recreational gatherings in Seoul to familiar, less crowded, and neighboring urban areas

Yoon, Jisung; Jung, Woo‐Sik; Kim, Hyunuk

doi:10.48550/arxiv.2109.00902

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 26 publications

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“…Various non-pharmaceutical interventions imposed by governments and agencies have enforced people to substantially change their lifestyles and reduce daily activity patterns, reducing trips to urban amenities such as restaurants, bars, and entertainment establishments 19 . While such behavior changes have had significant impacts on our physical health and activities 20,21 and mental wellbeing 22 , studies have also suggested their impact on social encounters in urban environments, affecting the social fabric of cities we live in 23 . The aftermath of the pandemic has brought also significant changes in behavior in our cities, including less use of public transportation 24 , more hours working from home 25 , and higher usage of online food and goods delivery services 26 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behavioral changes during the pandemic worsened income diversity of urban encounters

Yabe

Bueno

Dong

et al. 2022

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Diversity of physical encounters and social interactions in urban environments are known to spur economic productivity and innovation in cities, while also to foster social capital and resilience of communities. However, mobility restrictions during the pandemic have forced people to substantially reduce urban physical encounters, raising questions on the social implications of such behavioral changes. In this paper, we study how the income diversity of urban encounters have changed during different periods throughout the pandemic, using a large-scale, privacy-enhanced mobility dataset of more than one million anonymized mobile phone users in four large US cities, collected across three years spanning before and during the pandemic. We find that the diversity of urban encounters have substantially decreased (by 15% to 30%) during the pandemic and has persisted through late 2021, even though aggregated mobility metrics have recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Counterfactual analyses show that while the reduction of outside activities (higher rates of staying at home) was a major factor that contributed to decreased diversity in the early stages of the pandemic, behavioral changes including lower willingness to explore new places and changes in visitation preferences further worsened the long-term diversity of encounters. Our findings suggest that the pandemic could have long-lasting negative effects on urban income diversity, and provide implications for managing the trade-off between the stringency of COVID-19 policies and the diversity of urban encounters as we move beyond the pandemic.

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