Activity locations, residential segregation and the significance of residential neighbourhood boundary perceptions

The inadequacies of residential census geography in capturing urban residents’ routine exposures have motivated efforts to more directly measure residents’ activity spaces. In turn, insights regarding urban activity patterns have been used to motivate alternative residential neighbourhood measurement strategies incorporating dimensions of activity space in the form of egocentric neighbourhoods – measurement approaches that place individuals at the centre of their own residential neighbourhood units. Unexamined, however, is the extent to which the boundaries of residents’ own self-defined residential neighbourhoods compare with census-based and egocentric neighbourhood measurement approaches in aligning with residents’ routine activity locations. We first assess this question, examining whether the boundaries of residents’ self-defined residential neighbourhoods are in closer proximity to the coordinates of a range of activity location types than are the boundaries of their census and egocentric residential neighbourhood measurement approaches. We find little evidence that egocentric or, crucially, self-defined residential neighbourhoods better align with activity locations, suggesting a division in residents’ activity locations and conceptions of their residential neighbourhoods. We then examine opposing hypotheses about how self-defined residential neighbourhoods and census tracts compare in socioeconomic and racial composition. Overall, our findings suggest that residents bound less segregated neighbourhoods than those produced by census geography, but self-defined residential neighbourhoods still reflect a preference towards homophily when considering areas beyond the immediate environment of their residence. These findings underscore the significance of individuals’ conceptions of residential neighbourhoods to understanding and measuring urban social processes such as residential segregation and social disorganisation. 住宅普查地理在捕捉城市居民日常接触方面的不足促使人们努力更直接地测量居民的活动空间。反过来，关于城市活动模式的见解已被用来激励替代性街区测量策略，这些策略以“自我中心型街区”的形式纳入了活动空间的维度。自我中心型街区是将个人置于其街区中心的测量方法。然而，此前未被研究的是，在与居民的日常活动地点保持一致方面，居民自定义的街区边界与基于人口普查和自我中心型街区测量方法的街区边界之间的比较。我们首先评估这个问题，研究居民自定义的街区边界（与其人口普查和自我中心型街区测量方法的边界相比）是否更接近一系列活动地点类型的坐标。我们发现很少有证据表明自我中心型街区（或者，更关键的是，自定义街区）更好地与活动地点相一致，这表明居民的活动地点和他们的街区的概念有所不同。然后，我们研究了关于自定义街区和人口普查区在社会经济和种族构成方面的比较的、相互对立的假设。总的来说，我们的研究结果表明，居民自定义的街区的隔离程度比人口普查地理产生的隔离程度要低，但在考虑居住地最邻近的环境以外的地区的情况下，自定义街区仍然反映出对同质性的偏好。这些发现凸显了个人对居住街区的概念对于理解和衡量城市社会过程（如居住隔离和社会解体）的重要性。