Analysis of mobility homophily in Stockholm based on social network data

We present a novel metric for measuring relative connection between parts of a city using geotagged Twitter data as a proxy for co-occurrence of city residents. We find that socioeconomic similarity is a significant predictor of this connectivity metric, which we call “linkage strength”: neighborhoods that are similar to one another in terms of residents’ median income, education level, and (to a lesser extent) immigration history are more strongly connected in terms of the of people who spend time there, indicating some level of homophily in the way that individuals choose to move throughout a city’s districts. The authors would like to acknowledge the Senseable Stockholm Lab and its partners: City of Stockholm, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce and Newsec, in collaboration with MIT Senseable City Lab. We would also like to acknowledge the H2020 5G-TOURS project. Finally, we would like to thank the City of Stockholm municipality's Statistical Information Service for provision of population counts and socioeconomic data.