Comment by sinkasapa

As a non-specialist, I think a surprising statement is that in this particular field, there is an expectation that large, dense cities encourage socioeconomic mixing. That seems counter to everyday experience and policies that are sometimes enacted in cities to counter the trend, like bussing kids in poor neighborhoods into richer school districts. The term "ghetto" famously describes an urban trend to cut off poor enclaves, generally with some racial or ethnic component. I guess I felt like it was "common knowledge" that urbanization increased social stratification, whether in ancient times as agricultural societies developed, as I was taught in high school social studies, or in more modern cases where people leave the land to find opportunities, as in Latin America, for instance, where terms like favela are familiar even to English speakers to describe the cut-off, under-serviced and impoverished neighborhoods that have developed. Common knowledge being what it is, that isn't to say that anyone should believe that cities necessarily increase or decrease stratification without making measurements but stories of urban inequality seems to be so prevalent in popular culture that it seems strange that one would state that the opposite is a popular expectation but they have citations so I'm not questioning that the idea is out there, only that it is surprising that it is so prevalent that they need to open their article as though they are bucking a trend in the literature.