Perceiving exposure segregation with open urban imagery
For urban planners and sociologists, this work provides a scalable, interpretable method to link physical urban features to social segregation, offering a mechanism-based tool for policy evaluation.
The paper introduces VISAGE, a multi-modal model that uses satellite and street-level imagery to predict socioeconomic exposure segregation across 31 U.S. cities, achieving a Pearson correlation of 0.770 with mobility-derived segregation patterns. It identifies built environment features like defensible architecture and monofunctional zoning as key drivers of social isolation.
Socioeconomic exposure segregation -- the lack of daily interaction between income groups -- erodes social capital and entrenches inequality, yet the specific physical features that drive these behavioral restrictions remain poorly understood. Prior research has quantified where segregation occurs using mobility data, but has not identified how the built environment facilitates or inhibits these interactions. Here we introduce VISAGE, a large multi-modal model-enabled framework that perceives exposure segregation directly from open satellite and street-level imagery across 10,030 communities in 31 U.S. cities. Moving beyond black-box correlations, we operationalize cross-disciplinary sociological theory into an interpretable visual codebook to detect physical regulators of social mixing. We find that the built environment encodes a legible grammar of segregation: "defensible" architectural forms (e.g., fences, gated enclosures) and monofunctional zoning systematically predict higher social isolation, whereas mixed-use infrastructure fosters interaction, explaining substantial variance in mobility-derived segregation patterns (Pearson $r=0.770$). Crucially, we show that inclusionary housing policies manifest in distinct visual signatures associated with higher mixing, suggesting that policy interventions successfully alter the physical landscape to encourage diversity. Our findings offer a scalable pathway to decipher the social production of space, providing a mechanism-based lens to understand how the built environment shapes social behavior.