Are we breaking bubbles as we move? Exploring the relationship between urban mobility and segregation

Segregation often dismantles common activity spaces and isolates people of different backgrounds, leading toirreconcilable inequalities that disfavour the poor and minorities and intensifies societal fragmentation. Therefore,segregation has become an increasing concern and topic of research with studies typically concentratingon the residential communities of a particular racial or socioeconomic group. In contrast, this paper providesa comprehensive view of segregation in the context of how it interacts with urban mobility. Specifically,it expands upon prior research by employing large-scale, seamless telecommunication logs of London, UKto provide a holistic view of mobility across the entire socioeconomic spectrum. A method is developed totransform the data to flows between geographic areas with different socioeconomic statuses. Spatial interactionmodels are then calibrated to examine the impact of both geographical distance and socioeconomic distanceon the deterrence of flows and the analysis is extended to analyze the interaction of the two factors. Overall,socioeconomic distance is found to have a marginal effect compared to geographical distance. However,different effects are observed depending on the socioeconomic distance between flows and the deterrence of mobility tends to be the greatest when both physical and socioeconomic distance are high, suggesting thatboth factors may play a role creating and maintaining segregation.