The time geography of segregation during working hours

TL;DR

This study analyzes urban segregation during working hours in Santiago, Chile, using mobile phone data and community detection to reveal high segregation levels except in the downtown area, highlighting spatial and socio-economic dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a dynamic, data-driven approach to measure work-hour segregation through mobile trajectories and community detection, contrasting with traditional residential-focused studies.

Findings

Segregation during working hours is high in Santiago outside the downtown area.

The downtown area acts as a zone of social encounter and integration.

Methodology combines mobile data analysis with community detection and simulation.

Abstract

Understanding segregation is essential to develop planning tools for building more inclusive cities. Theoretically, segregation at the work place has been described as lower compared to residential segregation given the importance of skill complementarity among other productive factors shaping the economies of cities. This paper tackles segregation during working hours from a dynamical perspective by focusing on the movement of urbanites across the city. In contrast to measuring residential patterns of segregation, we used mobile phone data to infer home-work trajectory net- works and apply a community detection algorithm to the example city of Santiago, Chile. We then describe qualitatively and quantitatively outlined communities, in terms of their socio eco- nomic composition. We then evaluate segregation for each of these communities as the probability that a person from a specific community will interact with a co-worker from the same commu- nity. Finally, we compare these results with simulations where a new work location is set for each real user, following the empirical probability distributions of home-work distances and angles of direction for each community. Methodologically, this study shows that segregation during working hours for Santiago is unexpectedly high for most of the city with the exception of its central and business district. In fact, the only community that is not statistically segregated corresponds to the downtown area of Santiago, described as a zone of encounter and integration across the city.