Behavioral changes during the COVID-19 pandemic decreased income diversity of urban encounters.

ABSTRACT: Diversity of physical encounters in urban environments is known to spur economic productivity while also fostering social capital. However, mobility restrictions during the pandemic have forced people to reduce urban encounters, raising questions about the social implications of behavioral changes. In this paper, we study how individual income diversity of urban encounters changed during the pandemic, using a large-scale, privacy-enhanced mobility dataset of more than one million anonymized mobile phone users in Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Seattle, across three years spanning before and during the pandemic. We find that the diversity of urban encounters has substantially decreased (by 15% to 30%) during the pandemic and has persisted through late 2021, even though aggregated mobility

SUBMITTER: Yabe T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10120472 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature