Shopping mall attraction and social mixing at a city scale

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, peo...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Beiro, Mariano Gastón, Bravo, Loreto, Caro, Diego, Cattuto, Ciro, Ferres, Leo, Graells-Garrido, Eduardo
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2018
País:Argentina
Institución:Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Repositorio:CONICET Digital (CONICET)
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ri.conicet.gov.ar:11336/88103
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/11336/88103
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:CALL/DATA DETAIL RECORDS
HUMAN MOBILITY
MALLS AND RETAIL
SOCIAL MIXING
SOCIO-ECONOMIC FACTORS OF MOBILITY
URBAN INFORMATICS
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/2.2
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/2
Descripción
Sumario: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.