The Atlas of Inequality
Segregation is hurting our societies and specially our cities. But economic inequality isn’t just limited to neighborhoods. The restaurants, stores, and other places we visit in cities are all unequal in their own way.
The Atlas of Inequality shows the income inequality of people who visit different places in the Boston metro area. It uses aggregated anonymous location data from digital devices to estimate people’s incomes and where they spend their time. Using that data, we’ve made our own place inequality metric to capture how unequal the incomes of visitors to each place are. Economic inequality isn’t just limited to neighborhoods; it’s part of the places you visit every day.
Try it yourself here:
The Atlas of Inequality is a project from the Human Dynamics group at the MIT Media Lab and the Department of Mathematics at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
It is part of a broader initiative to understand human behavior in our cities and how large-scale problems like transportation, housing, segregation, or inequality depend in part on the emergent patterns of people’s individual opportunities and choices.