Project Team:
Wenfei Xu, Youssef Attia, Nada Attia, Yucheng Zhang, Tony Zong, Allie Chu

This project develops a national segregation dataset through cell phone location data. Our research questions are: Can cell phone location data be used to represent the population at the Census tract level across different types of urban settlement? What is the relationship between residential diversity and how does it relate to diverse social exposure? How do these patterns change across different types of land use and what can this reveal about when diverse social exposure occurs? The primary data used in this phase of the project is an anonymized sample of the total U.S. population and daily activities gathered from cell phone location in 2022. My methods consist of 1) constructing a probabilistic, synthetic population modeled using the cell phone location data and Census data, 2) creating a diversity measure based on the mobility data, 3) comparing these measures to the residential diversity measure, and 4) focusing on a selection of cities to highlight the spatial-temporal variation of these diversity measures and the possibility of revealing “third spaces”.