Shopping mall attraction and social mixing at a city scale
Date
2018
Type:
Article
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21 p.
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Abstract
In Latin America, shopping malls seem to offer an open, safe and democratic version
of the public space. However, it is often difficult to quantitatively measure whether
they indeed foster, hinder, or are neutral with respect to social inclusion. In this work,
we investigate if, and by how much, people from different social classes are attracted
by the same malls. Using a dataset of mobile phone network records from 387,152
devices identified as customers of 16 malls in Santiago de Chile, we performed
several analyses to study whether malls with higher social mixing attract more
people. Our pipeline, which starts with the socio-economic characterization of mall
visitors, includes the estimation of social mixing and diversity of malls, the application
of the gravity model of mobility, and the definition of a co-visitation model. Results
showed that people tend to choose a profile of malls more in line with their own
socio-economic status and the distance from their home to the mall, and that higher
mixing does positively contribute to the process of choosing a mall. We conclude that
(a) there is social mixing in malls, and (b) that social mixing is a factor at the time of
choosing which mall to go to. Thus, the potential for social mixing in malls could be
capitalized by designing public policies regarding transportation and mobility to
make some malls strong social inclusion hubs.
Description
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Citation
EPJ Data Science, 2018, vol 7, N°28, 21 p.
Keywords
Malls and retail, Human mobility, Socio-economic factors of mobility, Social mixing, Call/Data detail records, Urban informatics