Economic outcomes predicted by diversity in cities

Chong, Shi Kai; Bahrami, Mohsen; Chen, Hao; Balcısoy, Selim; Bozkaya, Burçin; Pentland, Alex

doi:10.1140/epjds/s13688-020-00234-x

Cited by 27 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Cities around the world currently face a wide array of challenges, ranging from combating inequality in wealth and economic opportunities 47 , to avoiding catastrophic outcomes caused by climate change-induced disasters 48 . Improving the inherent social capital of local communities and neighborhood networks, which are the fundamental units of collective decision making and support, is crucial for tackling these complex and global-scale societal challenges.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behavioral changes during the COVID-19 pandemic decreased income diversity of urban encounters

et al. 2023

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Diversity of physical encounters in urban environments is known to spur economic productivity while also fostering social capital. However, mobility restrictions during the pandemic have forced people to reduce urban encounters, raising questions about the social implications of behavioral changes. In this paper, we study how individual income diversity of urban encounters changed during the pandemic, using a large-scale, privacy-enhanced mobility dataset of more than one million anonymized mobile phone users in Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Seattle, across three years spanning before and during the pandemic. We find that the diversity of urban encounters has 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 behavioral changes including lower willingness to explore new places further decreased the diversity of encounters in the long term. Our findings 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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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behavioral changes during the COVID-19 pandemic decreased income diversity of urban encounters

et al. 2023

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“…Cities are champions of diversity 1 – 3 . Complex interaction networks of individuals in urban areas enabled by population density, co-location, and easy access together made cities the global engines of technological and economic progress 4 – 7 . However, cities are also known for high levels of segregation 8 – 10 where disparate neighborhoods are separated from each other in the urban space 11 – 15 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Universal patterns of long-distance commuting and social assortativity in cities

Bokányi

Juhász

Karsai

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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Millions commute to work every day in cities and interact with colleagues, partners, friends, and strangers. Commuting facilitates the mixing of people from distant and diverse neighborhoods, but whether this has an imprint on social inclusion or instead, connections remain assortative is less explored. In this paper, we aim to better understand income sorting in social networks inside cities and investigate how commuting distance conditions the online social ties of Twitter users in the 50 largest metropolitan areas of the United States. An above-median commuting distance in cities is linked to more diverse individual networks, moreover, we find that longer commutes are associated with a nearly uniform, moderate reduction of overall social tie assortativity across all cities. This suggests a universal relation between long-distance commutes and the integration of social networks. Our results inform policy that facilitating access across distant neighborhoods can advance the social inclusion of low-income groups.

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“…Studies following a close approach have been also carried out on the happiness of citizens (Daniele et al 2014;Alshamsi et al 2015). A study closer to ours shows that the diversity of goods and services within a city neighborhood can define its economic growth (Chong et al 2020). Finally, Di Clemente et al (2018) have used a text compression technique on the sequences of credit card purchases, as here, to show that it is possible to detect ubiquitous patterns of collective behavior.…”

mentioning

confidence: 71%

“…A study closer to ours shows that the diversity of goods and services within a city neighborhood can define its economic growth (Chong et al. 2020 ). Finally, Di Clemente et al.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 80%

City consumption profile: a city perspective on the spending behavior of citizens

Galdeman

Zignani

et al. 2021

Appl Netw Sci

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In designing the city of the future, city managers and urban planners are driven by specific citizens’ behaviors. In fact, economic and financial behaviors, and specifically, which goods and services citizens purchase and how they allocate their spending, are playing a central role in planning targeted services. In this context, cashless payments provide an invaluable data source to identify such spending behaviors. In this work, we propose a methodology to extract the consumption behaviors of a large sample of customers through credit card transaction data. The main outcome of the methodology is a concise representation of the economic behavior of people residing in a city, the so-called city consumption profile. We inferred the city consumption profile from a network-based representation of the similarity among the customers in terms of purchase allocation; on top of which we applied a community detection algorithm to identify the representative consumption profiles. By applying the above methodology to a set of credit card transactions of an Italian financial group, we showed that cities, even geographically close, exhibit different profiles which makes them unique. Specifically, usage patterns focused on a single type of good/service—mono-categorical consumption profile—are the main factors leading to the differences in the city profiles. Our analysis also showed that there is a group of consumption profiles common to all cities, made up by purchases of primary goods/services, such as food or clothing. In general, the city consumption profile represents a tool for understanding the economic behaviors of the citizens and for comparing different cities. Moreover, city planners and managers may use it in the outline of city services tailored to the citizens’ needs.

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Economic outcomes predicted by diversity in cities

Cited by 27 publications

References 43 publications

Behavioral changes during the COVID-19 pandemic decreased income diversity of urban encounters

Behavioral changes during the COVID-19 pandemic decreased income diversity of urban encounters

Universal patterns of long-distance commuting and social assortativity in cities

City consumption profile: a city perspective on the spending behavior of citizens

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