The role of urban amenities in facilitating social mixing: Evidence from Stockholm

Though the existence of socioeconomic segregation in social interactions has been consistently documented and compared across cities in a growing body of literature, less attention has been paid to within-city analysis of the types of places at which particularly integrated or segregated interactions occur. Dependencies between socioeconomic profile, residential location, preferences and behavior make this kind of analysis difficult. Further, beyond understanding where diverse social interactions take place, it is important to know whether increasing access to those types of spaces via changes to the transportation network can actually increase the level of diversity in social interactions—a more causal question that remains relatively unexplored in the literature. This study presents new perspectives on analyzing social mixing and socioeconomic integration in cities using geolocated cellphone data. Using a call detail record dataset which describes the movements of over one million cell phone users in Stockholm, Sweden, this study quantifies the contribution of access to various types of urban amenities to one’s exposure to people with diverse income levels. Our results provide evidence that areas of the city with more libraries, educational institutions, healthcare establishments, parks and restaurants host more exposures between people who are different from one another in terms of income. Further, we leverage random shocks to the transportation network that come from maintenance-based road closures to identify a causal relationship between access to parks, services and healthcare establishments and experienced income diversity. Temporary, random increases in travel times to these spaces due to road closures result in less diverse day-to-day encounters for urban residents.