Social Isolation in Motion: Socioeconomic Segregation in Everyday Mobility by Neighborhood Racial-Ethnic Composition in U.S. Cities

• In Event: 30806 - Urban Mobility

Abstract

Recent scholarship identifies socioeconomic (dis)advantage in urban neighborhoods’ routine mobility networks—the other neighborhoods their residents visit and receive visits from—as an important predictor of their vitality. Mobility-based advantage or disadvantage is correlated with, but conceptually and empirically distinct from, the socioeconomic status of a neighborhood’s residents. Thus, residential and mobility-based disadvantage can lead to distinct or compounding inequalities. This paper builds on Wilson’s social isolation framework to analyze how mobility-based disadvantage is unequally distributed by neighborhood racial and ethnic composition in the 100 most populous cities in the United States. Predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods experience heightened levels of mobility-based disadvantage, which deepens well-known disparities with predominantly white neighborhoods based on residents’ socioeconomic statuses. Yet, the extent of these inequalities can be moderated by city demographics and urban form. Isolation in structural neighborhood networks emerges as a salient feature of racial-ethnic inequality, though that one varies between cities.

Author

• Brian L. Levy, University of South Carolina