Previous studies show that the racial and income distribution of neighbourhoods have historically shaped the evolution of American cities at multiple scales. Urban segregation has been traditionally analysed by mapping the geographical distribution of homes in urban areas using surveys or Census data.
Segregation directly affects the way people create and maintain strong ties and therefore, the properties and collective behaviours of the emergent social space.
While people are mostly influenced by stronger and closer ties, weaker ties are responsible for integrating social groups at higher scales. The strength of relationships has a key role in collective learning and the spread of information and behaviours. Members of a social space share stronger relationships with each other than with people from separated spaces. The social space is where people gather and interact, both physically and online. It is crucial to understand how the segregation of social interactions and constraints of information flows are related to the differentiation, and polarization, of emergent social behaviours. The choice of whom to interact with and imitate influences the information people receive and the way individuals think and behave, evolving toward self-reinforcing group identities. Group polarization can also emerge from autonomous and distributed individual actions. It can emerge due to the behaviour of individuals like other self-organizing properties of complex systems. Urban segregation is a complex process that does not require a centralized agent to enforce. Our analysis is consistent with theoretical concepts suggesting polarization is associated with social exposure that reinforces within-group homogenization and between-group differentiation, and they together promote social fragmentation in mirrored physical and virtual spaces.
We show that online interactions are segregated by income just as physical interactions are, and that physical separation reflects polarized behaviours beyond culture or politics. Here, we show that the virtual space is a reflection of the geographical space where physical interactions and proximity-based social learning are the main transmitters of ideas. Of central importance to the future of society is understanding how existing physical segregation affects online social fragmentation.
However, actual information flows are heterogeneous and confined to self-organized echo-chambers. The Internet radically transformed communication by democratizing broadcast capabilities and enabling easy and borderless formation of new acquaintances. Social behaviours emerge from the exchange of information among individuals-constrained by and reciprocally influencing the structure of information flows.
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