How Socially Integrated Is Your City? Ask Twitter.

A central feature of contemporary life is the geographic sorting and segregation of people across class, racial, and other lines. In his book The Big Sort, Bill Bishop elucidated how Americans increasingly sort ourselves into different places according to income, education, political ideology, and cultural beliefs. But at the same time, there are aspects of cities—density and transit, trust and social capital—that help push us together and form connections.

A new study by a team of researchers at Harvard and Northeastern universities, written up in an article in Sociological Methods & Research, uses Twitter to examine social connectedness among the neighborhoods of a city. The researchers, who include the eminent urban sociologists Robert Sampson and Mario Small, define the “structural connectedness” of a city as the extent to which residents in each neighborhood travel to other neighborhoods. It is essentially a measure of how socially integrated a city is—the opposite of segregation.