The two coffee shops occupy the exact same block in Boston. Yet while they’re just a couple minutes walk apart, each serves a different mix of clientele. The first spot caters to people from many different income brackets, but the second caters almost exclusively to people with lower-income levels.
That’s an example of “place inequality”–a metric that measures how people of different income, rich and poor alike, tend to cluster in some public spots either because they feel more comfortable there (or perhaps are excluded elsewhere).
As the Atlas’s instructions make clear, users can zoom in to see color-coded representations clustered at different coffee shops, movie theatres, stores, and restaurants around the city. (More than 30,000 places were identified by using a public application programming interface from FourSquare.)
Take, for instance, the coffee shop, which is called out in a section examining “stories” the groups uncovered. “Through these choices we build our habits and routines,” the researchers write. “The fact that our routines decide where we spend our time also means they decide who we spend our time with.” Providing people with a tool to recognize that is a good thing. Perhaps businesses and cities alike will see the benefit of building more intentionally inclusive spaces which within everyone can interact.