Urban mobility enables deprivation bubble breaking in Indian and Mexican cities

TL;DR

This study quantifies how residents in Indian and Mexican cities travel beyond their neighborhoods to access better amenities, revealing a mobility pattern that mitigates local deprivation and highlights spatial inequality.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of mobility patterns that go beyond residence-based deprivation measures, using mobile data and satellite indices across 64 cities.

Findings

Deprived residents travel to less deprived areas more than gravity models predict.

High local amenity diversity reduces the need for cross-neighborhood travel.

High amenity density and spillovers increase cross-boundary mobility.

Abstract

Urban deprivation is traditionally measured using static, residence-based indicators, capturing the socioeconomic, demographic, and spatial conditions of neighborhoods. However, this approach overlooks how daily movement allows residents to navigate the city, potentially exposing them to opportunities that differ significantly from their residential environments. To bridge this gap, we quantify the extent of bubble breaking - travel to less deprived areas - by analyzing mobile phone mobility networks combined with satellite-derived deprivation indices across 64 cities in India and Mexico. We find that residents of deprived areas systematically travel to better-off locations to meet daily needs, exhibiting a compensatory mobility pattern that significantly exceeds expectations derived from gravity models based on population and road networks. This residual bubble breaking (the part gravity models can not explain) is associated with a tension in the built environment: while high local amenity diversity allows residents to satisfy needs locally, high amenity density and positive spillovers from neighboring areas is associated with movement across socioeconomic boundaries. Overall, residual bubble breaking reflects the extent to which residents rely on cross-neighborhood mobility to overcome local amenity deficits, a dimension of spatial inequality that residence-based measures leave unobserved.