Speaker Bio
Esteban Moro Egido is an associate professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain), visiting professor at MIT Media Lab (US) and member of the Joint Institute UC3M-Santander on Big Data. Esteban served as a consultant for many public and private institutions and has previously held positions in University of Oxford (UK), Institute of Knowledge Engineering (Spain), Instituto Mixto de Ciencias Matemáticas (Spain). Esteban obtained his BSc in Physics from the University of Salamanca and a Ph.D in physics from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. He has published over 50 articles and has led and participated in over 20 projects funded by government agencies and/or private companies. His areas of interests are applied mathematics, financial mathematics, viral marketing and social network. He received the “Shared University Award” from IBM in 2007 for modeling the spread of information in social networks and application to viral marketing. And a Research Excellence Award in 2013 and 2015 by the Carlos III University of Madrid. His recent work has been covered by many media outlets, including articles and interviews in newspapers like El Pais, Muy Interesante, The Atlantic, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
Abstract
Segregation is one of the most important population processes in cities: in the US one in five city dwellers live in a very income-segregated community. Social or income segregation is a spatial process and most work has focused mainly in residential segregation, i.e. on the basis of places of residence. But due to increases in mobility of people today, segregation is a process than goes beyond home or work places. Furthermore, as Ray Oldenburg argued, third places (not home or work) in which people mix are important for civil society, democracy or civic engagement. But are there still enough third places in our cities to do that? To answer that question we study a unique database of 3 billion location events of 329k users in the Boston metropolitan area. Using that data we identify 10k different places where people of different economical backgrounds mix and analyzed their characteristics. We find that most of the third places are related to shopping and leisure activities and that patterns of mixing depend on the actual character of the place. Finally we construct the mobility network of people between those places to analyze how important are third places in the problem of mobility network resilience. We discuss the implications of our results in the context of future development of areas and in the ever-changing evolution of our cities.