Social trajectory diversity likely to decline across five countries
Conditions for Social Trajectory Collapse: Agent-Based Simulation of Time-Geographic Trajectory Distributions
Computers and Society
Summary
Many cities around the world want to encourage people to spread out more evenly rather than crowding in just a few places. The authors study how people's habitual movements among neighborhoods and cities might change by 2036 in China, Russia, Japan, the UK, and the US. Their model shows that the variety of people's daily movement patterns will shrink significantly, meaning fewer unique travel habits. This shrinking diversity comes with higher costs for people and mixed effects on overall well-being depending on the country.
What this means in practice
- •For urban planners: Forecast changes in population movement diversity to better design balanced regional policies considering cost and welfare impacts.
- •For transportation modelers: Incorporate simulated trajectory diversity decline to improve travel demand models for metropolitan planning in multiple countries.
Authors
Daneul Kim, Yuyeong Kim
Abstract
Metropolitan concentration has motivated policies for more balanced regional development. We use agent-based simulation to examine trajectory diversity, the variety of people's recurring activity orientations toward neighborhoods, urban centers, and wider networks. The model maps 2010 population shares to 2026 distributions in five country cases, China, Russia, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and simulates change to 2036. Trajectory diversity declines by 52.6-79.0% over 2026-2036. Russia and Japan show the largest increases in the share of the most common trajectory, while US diversity contracts despite a slight decline in this share. Cost burdens rise throughout, whereas welfare falls in the Russian and Japanese cases but rises in the other three. These findings suggest that regional development should be assessed through activity diversity, cost burdens, and welfare together.