
Segregated interactions in urban and online spaces - wslh
https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.04027
======
charlescearl
On the one hand this seems to highlight the lived reality of many of us —
moving from a segregated to more integrated neighborhoods brings its own set
of issues.

In my case moving out of a middle class Black “food desert” into a more
“diverse” neighborhood brought the stares of neighbors and disturbing and
mentally, emotionally challenging micro-aggressions — how many times do you
have to hear the same neighbors ask “Do you live around here?” before it
starts to get to you? Ten years is a long time to deal with persistent
invisibility. Then there are policing patterns. In that context, the ability
to find community on Twitter and FB provides some access to affirmation.

Black and Brown people in the US and Europe have been asking for generations
to the groceries and other stores and services that the more privileged
populations take for granted. In that sense the paper’s conclusions seem like
old news. Proposals like the Paris 15 minute city proposal [1] might be one
ray of hope.

It would have been nice for the paper to talk about segregation attributable
to explicit and implicit state policies (e.g. state enforced segregation in
the US, now outlawed but still visible in redlining practices today) vs
cultural segregation (anybody watched Gentefied [2]?) other historic patterns.
All that to say that there is probably a lot of important questions to resolve
in how race, culture, ethnicity overlap when trying tease apart economic and
online segregation.

Pentland also received a great deal of criticism in Shoshana Zuboff’s book
Surveillance Capitalism [3]. The gist of her critique of Pentland’s social
physics is that it amounts to a justification of behaviorist attempt at mass
social control. Having heard a presentation of Pentland’s at a NetSci
conference a few years ago, I didn’t think it that over arching, but still. I
don’t know if people here had done much thinking about this. I can imagine a
critique of this paper as being an attempt to control the behavior of
segregated or marginalized communities.

I’m curious whether the data sets used are publicly available.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/07/paris-mayor-
un...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/07/paris-mayor-
unveils-15-minute-city-plan-in-re-election-campaign) [2]
[https://www.netflix.com/Title/80198208](https://www.netflix.com/Title/80198208)
[3]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism)

~~~
austincheney
> In my case moving out of a middle class Black “food desert” into a more
> “diverse” neighborhood brought the stares of neighbors and disturbing and
> mentally, emotionally challenging micro-aggressions — how many times do you
> have to hear the same neighbors ask “Do you live around here?” before it
> starts to get to you? Ten years is a long time to deal with persistent
> invisibility. Then there are policing patterns. In that context, the ability
> to find community on Twitter and FB provides some access to affirmation.

I am curious what you mean by integrated, because that does not at all sound
integrated. I suppose my experiences are wildly different because my
neighborhood is now mostly composed of rental houses and renters seem to come
and go much more frequently. Its weird because the renters are the majority of
the population and have no vote or say in HOA policies, but they are still
obligated to follow HOA policies just the same.

~~~
charlescearl
"Integrated" in my experience seems to be a contested term:

\- During my elementary school and the first part of my high school years,
there were attempts in Atlanta to de-segregate schools via busing of students
from Black to white neighborhoods. The schools where my neighbors who
participated were sent to typically were not "integrated" in the sense of
complete 50/50 proportionality. Typically in the Southern US, the mere
presence of a Black population within a formerly segregated institution
counted as "integration" [1].

\- Similarly, the neighborhood next to mine formerly had covenants on who a
house could be sold to. The city was founded by an advocate and supporter of
the Klan. Informally, "integration" is thought of as "Well, the neighborhood
used to be white by law, now the town/neighborhood is 30% Black..." The
"tipping point" phenomenon, in which white residents leave if the number of
Black/LatinX residents increase above a threshold is documented [2].

All that to say that "integrated" is a term relative comparison, where the
majority of neighborhoods remain deeply segregated, perhaps even an 70/30
comparison is likely to count as "diverse" or "integrated", but the old
patterns of power are likely to be replicated.

[1][https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-unhealed-
wounds...](https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-unhealed-wounds-of-a-
mass-arrest-of-black-students-at-ole-miss-fifty-years-later)
[2][http://cityobservatory.org/are-racial-tipping-points-
overblo...](http://cityobservatory.org/are-racial-tipping-points-overblown/)

~~~
austincheney
It still seems weird to me. I should also add that my major city is the fast
growing major city in the US at about 4% year over year for the last 20 years
so traditional rules about ethic neighborhoods either don't apply or are
relegated to very old and low prosperity neighborhoods far away. In this past
decade alone my city has grown by about 30% and is racing to reach 1.2 million
residents in the next twenty years nearly doubling in size from 20 years ago.

