PLoS ONE (Jan 2021)

Analysis of mobility homophily in Stockholm based on social network data.

  • Cate Heine,
  • Cristina Marquez,
  • Paolo Santi,
  • Marcus Sundberg,
  • Miriam Nordfors,
  • Carlo Ratti

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247996
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 16, no. 3
p. e0247996

Abstract

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We present a novel metric for measuring relative connection between parts of a city using geotagged Twitter data as a proxy for co-occurrence of city residents. We find that socioeconomic similarity is a significant predictor of this connectivity metric, which we call "linkage strength": neighborhoods that are similar to one another in terms of residents' median income, education level, and (to a lesser extent) immigration history are more strongly connected in terms of the of people who spend time there, indicating some level of homophily in the way that individuals choose to move throughout a city's districts.