There were many fallouts from the COVID-19 pandemic, but one that is rarely discussed is its effect on diverse encounters and social mixing in our cities. Greater interaction between different groups in cities that leads to sharing ideas and experience is seen as one of the many benefits of urbanization.
Now, a study from researchers at MIT and Oxford University explores how much mobility and diverse social encounters were impacted by the pandemic, potentially altering how we engage with and relate to one another. Their findings suggest the pandemic could have long lasting negative effects on income diversity, highlighting the need for policies to reverse this trend.
Given how lockdowns forced people to reduce their movement during the pandemic, this study raises many questions about the social consequences of these mandated behavioral changes.
Using mobility data gathered across four major U.S. cities — Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Seattle — the researchers found the diversity of urban encounters diminished significantly during the pandemic.
This shouldn’t be surprising given public policies sought to reduce the physical vectors that were spreading the highly contagious SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID. But this study shows these behavioral changes persisted long after the lockdowns ended and other restrictions were removed.
The researchers found a 15-30% decrease in the number of visits individuals were making to areas socioeconomically different from their own, even after the limits ended.
“Income diversity of urban encounters decreased during the pandemic, and not just in the lockdown stages,” Takahiro Yabe, a postdoc at MIT Media Lab and a study co-author, told MIT News. “It decreased in the long term as well, after mobility patterns recovered.”
The implications of this reduction of social mixing are huge. The social disparities experienced in many cities were already significant before COVID struck.
Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat cited the MIT study in a recent column. “Our city was already a living exhibit of tech-fueled inequality,” Westneat wrote. “The pandemic put that on supercycle.”
Now it appears the governmental and personal decisions made in response to the pandemic may have extended these inequalities further. Given all the efforts many cities have made trying to address income inequality and economic disparity, this study suggests an unseen mechanism that is offsetting all of that hard work.
The ability to cultivate dense social connections through physical encounters is considered a major driver of productivity and innovation in cities. This is crucial not only for economic growth. It’s been demonstrated that scale and diversity in all kinds of networks has a direct impact on their resilience and ability to recover from adversity.
“We see changes like working from home, less exploration, more online shopping, all these behaviors add up,” says Esteban Moro, a research scientist at MIT’s Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC) and one of the paper’s co-authors.
“It’s creating an urban fabric that is actually more brittle, in the sense we are less exposed to other people,” Moro continued. “We don’t get to know other people in the city, and that is very important for policies and public opinion.”
Mobility data for the study covered a period between early 2019 and late 2021. It was obtained from devices that opted-in to anonymized collection under a GDPR and CCPA compliant framework. (GDPR is the General Data Protection Regulation established by EU law. CCPA is the California Consumer Privacy Act.) This data provided high-resolution mobile location pings for more than one million devices across four U.S. census core-based statistical areas (CBSAs).
This location information was correlated with a collection of 433,000 verified places across four CBSAs, obtained via the Foursquare API. The socio-economic status (SES) of each anonymized individual was approximated from their home census block group using the 2016-2020 five-year American Community Survey. Individuals’ home areas were estimated using their most common location during the nighttime, between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. Individuals were then categorized into equal-sized SES quantiles according to the median household income of their home area.
“Despite the substantial differences in how cities dealt with COVID-19, the decrease in diversity and the behavioral changes were surprisingly similar across the four cities,” observed Yabe.
“I think there is a lot we can do from a policy standpoint to bring people back to places that used to be a lot more diverse.”
According to the study, activity patterns had returned to pre-pandemic levels by October 2021, with people having resumed spending time outside their homes and visiting different POIs, similar to before the pandemic. However, the income diversity of encounters did not follow the same pattern, with both the income diversity experienced at places and by individuals consistently lower than the pre-pandemic levels for all four cities.
Given the study only runs through late 2021, it does raise some questions about this pattern. While movement and encounters people deemed of higher necessity to daily life had returned, the study notes that less “essential” destinations did not return to pre-pandemic levels. Those locations categorized as “museums,” “leisure,” “transportation,” and “coffee” places had the largest decrease in diversity according to the study.
It seems likely that for many people, some psychological barriers to movement continued to persist. It would be interesting to know if extending the study period through late 2022, or even beyond, showed the pattern continuing or slowly returning to pre-pandemic “normal.”
The authors also noted the study design didn’t consider the purpose of visits, types of encounters, or other socioeconomic and demographic dimensions, including racial diversity. Currently, they are developing further studies related to cultural and public institutions, as well as transportation issues, to try to evaluate urban connectivity in additional detail.
Most of us know people who still modify their behavior post-pandemic. For some, it will be a long time before they return to all their previous patterns of activity, if they ever do. There’s no denying that the pandemic altered our behaviors, movements, and activities as a society. Understanding the long-term repercussions of such a crisis as well as the policies implemented responding to it will be critical to making better responses in the future.
Yabe noted: “I think there is a lot we can do from a policy standpoint to bring people back to places that used to be a lot more diverse.”
The paper, “Behavioral changes during the Covid-19 pandemic decreased income diversity of urban encounters,” was published April 21 in Nature Communications. The co-authors are Yabe; Moro, who is also an associate professor at the University Carlos III of Madrid; Bernardo García Bulle Bueno, a doctoral candidate at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS); Xiaowen Dong, an associate professor at Oxford University; and Alex Pentland, professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and the Toshiba Professor at the Media Lab.
