Racial/ethnic residential segregation and urban spatial networks in the United States

An old assumption in geography is that everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things (Tobler 1970). For this reason, the focus of urban studies has been on the neighborhood as the primary unit of analysis (Craven and Wellman 1973). However, urban geographers and planners have long known that people circulate in much larger circles than their immediate neighborhoods, and more recent work using big-data approaches have confirmed this on a large scale (Wang et al. 2018). Individuals and families move about the metropolitan area throughout the day in order to meet a wide variety of daily needs, including work, education and leisure. It is also evident that these broad movement patterns vary by the socio-demographic characteristics of residents and households. However, there is little research on the ways in which involuntary racial/ethnic/class-based residential segregation impacts the manner in which people move about the city and the extent of their spatial networks. Our central question is, does exclusionary residential segregation affect the travel distances, trip frequency and mode of travel of households in segregated areas independent of households’ financial and spatial resources? That is, do households that are in segregated neighborhoods tend to have more restricted or broader spatial networks than comparable households in integrated neighborhoods?