American society has long been split across the fault lines of class and race. William Julius Wilson famously observed that poor African Americans who comprise the “truly disadvantaged” remain substantially isolated from the rest of society and the American economy. But not only are Americans divided by race, we are divided by how we travel about the city for everyday activities like shopping, visiting friends and family, working, or going out to eat. Race is the defining element of this segregation of mobility: Black households of all income groups and classes are more isolated and limited in where and how they move around cities, and rarely enter middle-class white areas.
A recent study by some of the world’s leading poverty researchers, including Robert Sampson and Mario Small of Harvard University, sheds new light by tracking the way different classes and races of people are segregated in our cities—not only based on where they live and grow up, but in where they travel in the city.
The researchers used Twitter data to map the everyday mobility patterns of residents in America’s 50 most populous cities and their surrounding metro areas. The study analyzed some 650 million geo-tagged tweets by 400,000 people for the 18-month period stretching from October 2013 through March 2015. They linked those tweets to neighborhoods where people lived and the places they traveled both throughout the cities and in the larger metropolitan area in their day-to-day lives. The researchers separated neighborhoods into poor and non-poor (based on the percent of households under the federal poverty line) and by whether they are mainly white, black, or Hispanic.
[For more on this story by RICHARD FLORIDA, go to https://www.citylab.com/equity...eryday-lives/567164/]
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