Can Financial Transactions Reveal the Change in Social Fabric Triggered by Urban Regeneration?

Abstract

In this study, we aimed to investigate the relationship between single-building scaled urban regeneration, driven by the Disaster Risk Transformation Law, and urban segregation in Maltepe district. Following stricter building codes, the district underwent significant demolition and construction between 2014 and 2015. We employ construction data and credit card transaction data to analyze the demographic changes. We find that urban regeneration due to building renewal may have diverse context-dependent effects on the demographic tapestry of communities, their culture and history. While some neighborhoods showed positive response to increased local amenities and resulted in reduced mobility outside their local area, leading to greater income segregation from the rest of the city, others behaved in the opposite direction. Similarly, the transformation process has attracted a more educated and higher-income inflow of residents in some neighborhoods compared to others. Herein, we employ new big data and mobility-driven metrics from computational social science such as diversity, loyalty and assortativity to reveal the link between urban regeneration and segregation. Our findings provide important clues and insights to urban planners for developing urban policies leading to neighborhood designs that are more connected to each other (hence reducing segregation) while still offering modern amenities expected by their residents.