The scales of urban mobility shape socioeconomic mixing
Abstract
Urban daily mobility determines how far we travel and whom we encounter through the city. As local-living and polycentric planning gain popularity, a key question is whether more localised mobility can preserve the socioeconomic mixing that cities enable. Yet systematic evidence on how different scales of movement contribute to experienced social exposure remains limited. Here, we use anonymised GPS traces from ~20 million devices across 226 functional urban areas in France, Germany and the UK to decompose everyday mobility into three scales - proximal, medial and distal - and link these to the socioeconomic composition of destinations. Proximal trips remain similar in length across neighbourhoods, whereas medial and distal trips lengthen toward the periphery. Distal trips account for 33% of travel but facilitate 42% of inter-group encounters; reallocating them to local movement reduces experienced mixing by up to one third. These findings reveal a trade-off between shorter travel and integrated urban living.
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BibTeX
@misc{renninger2026scales,
title = {{The scales of urban mobility shape socioeconomic mixing}},
author = {Andrew Renninger and Egor Kotov and Carmen Cabrera},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = aug,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2608.28734},
eprint = {2608.28734},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28734},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The scales of urban mobility shape socioeconomic mixing
AU - Andrew Renninger
AU - Egor Kotov
AU - Carmen Cabrera
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/08/28
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2608.28734
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28734
AB - Urban daily mobility determines how far we travel and whom we encounter through the city. As local-living and polycentric planning gain popularity, a key question is whether more localised mobility can preserve the socioeconomic mixing that cities enable. Yet systematic evidence on how different scales of movement contribute to experienced social exposure remains limited. Here, we use anonymised GPS traces from ~20 million devices across 226 functional urban areas in France, Germany and the UK to decompose everyday mobility into three scales - proximal, medial and distal - and link these to the socioeconomic composition of destinations. Proximal trips remain similar in length across neighbourhoods, whereas medial and distal trips lengthen toward the periphery. Distal trips account for 33% of travel but facilitate 42% of inter-group encounters; reallocating them to local movement reduces experienced mixing by up to one third. These findings reveal a trade-off between shorter travel and integrated urban living.
ER -