Understanding urban inequality and scaling law: A human mobility perspective

Existing research mainly examined the urban scaling laws of social inequality based on income
variable. Other forms of socio-spatial inequalities and their relationship with population size
have not been well understood. Because of the powerful ability of human mobility in revealing
socio-spatial inequality and the availability of data sources, this study extends the literature by
introduced three types of mobility indicators (i.e., number of activity points, radius of gyration
and self-containment). The results show that different characterisation of inequality present
different spatial patterns and lead to different scaling laws. Overall, the inequalities in terms of
the examined mobility dimensions don’t scale super-linearly with the population size, suggesting
the complex nature of urban systems and the social phenomenon.