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Neighborhood Networks and Urban Social
Integration based on Everyday Urban Mobility
Living in disadvantaged neighborhoods is widely assumed to undermine life chances because residents are isolated from neighborhoods with greater resources. Yet, residential isolation may be mitigated by individuals spending much of their everyday lives outside their home neighborhoods, a possibility that has been difficult to assess on a large scale. With colleagues, I have studied the consequences of urban mobility for the social structure of cities, including how a neighborhoods vitality depends not only on its own conditions, but also the conditions of the neighborhoods to which its residents are connected, through networks of everyday urban mobility.
Based on this framework, this ongoing project highlights three arguments. The first is that even though residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods may travel far and wide, their relative isolation by race and class persists. The second is that mobility-based socioeconomic disadvantage explains neighborhood rates of violence beyond residential-based disadvantage. Third, we argue that a city’s degree of social connectedness depends on how uneven and concentrated the networks of everyday mobility are among its neighborhoods, which in turn are hypothesized to predict rates of crime across cities beyond that expected by their residential-based segregation. We test these propositions using geocoded networks of movement throughout the 50 largest American cities. The results offer a new way of thinking about neighborhood effects, spatial inequality, and structural theories of crime. We also are producing new measures of racially segregated mobility for cities and triple disadvantage for the neighborhoods of each of America’s largest cities that will be posted publicly.
Selected Papers and articles:
Wang, Ryan Qi, Nolan Phillips, Mario L. Small, and Robert J. Sampson. 2018. Urban Mobility and Neighborhood Isolation in America's 50 Largest Cities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115: 7735–7740.
Sampson, Robert J. 2019. Neighborhood Effects and Beyond: Explaining the Paradoxes of Inequality in the Changing American Metropolis. Urban Studies 56: 3-32.
Phillips Nolan, Brian L. Levy, Robert J. Sampson, Mario L. Small, Ryan Qi Wang. 2019. The Social Integration of American Cities: Network Measures of Connectedness Based on Everyday Mobility across Neighborhoods. Sociological Methods and Research 50.
See Where white people go, where Black people go: Cellphone data reveals how segregated Bostonians are in their movements, Boston Globe, Ideas Section. October 31, 2021.
Sampson, Robert J. and Brian L. Levy. 2020. Beyond Residential Mobility: Mobility-Based Connectedness and Rates of Violence in Large Cities. Race and Social Problems 12:77-86.
Sampson, Robert J. 2020. A Network Approach to Neighborhoods, Cities, and Crime Based on Everyday Urban Mobility. International Journal of Criminal Justice 2: 3-15.
Levy Brian L., Nolan E. Phillips, and Robert J. Sampson. 2020. Triple Disadvantage: Neighborhood Networks of Everyday Urban Mobility and Violence in American Cities. American Sociological Review 85(6): 925-956.
A neighborhood’s well-being depends not only on its own socioeconomic conditions but on those of the neighborhoods its residents visit and are visited by: New study measures neighborhood inequality and violence based on everyday mobility.
Candipan, Jennifer, Nolan E. Phillips, Robert J. Sampson, and Mario Small. 2021. From Residence to Movement: The Nature of Racial Segregation in Everyday Urban Mobility. Urban Studies.
Levy, Brian L., Karl Vachuska, S. V. Subramanian, and Robert J. Sampson. 2022. Neighborhood Socioeconomic Inequality Based on Everyday Mobility Predicts Covid-19 Infection in San Francisco, Seattle, and Wisconsin. Science Advances 8:eabl3825.
See also: ‘We don't just live in our neighborhoods': How neighborhood inequality might have been linked to your risk of getting COVID. Ashley Luthern, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Feb. 25, 2022.
Sampson, Robert J. and Brian L. Levy. 2022. The Enduring Neighborhood Effect, Everyday Urban Mobility, and Violence in Chicago. The University of Chicago Law Review 89(2): 323-347.
