Cocooning Throughout Our Daily Lives: Evidence from a Multi‐Scalar Analysis of Ethnic Activity Space Segregation in Rotterdam

Recent work suggests that segregation may persist beyond residential neighbourhoods into other aspects of our daily lives, as broadly captured by our ‘activity spaces’. We contribute to this ongoing research by extending the concept of cocooning — a person's exposure to segregation across their daily life — to activity spaces. We conduct two parallel, multi‐scalar empirical investigations of ethnic activity space segregation in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, one using a representative household mobility survey and one using geo‐located social media data. To operationalise cocooning, we compare segregation in people's activity spaces against the segregation they would experience across all theoretically accessible neighbourhoods and randomly chosen subsets of theoretically accessible neighbourhoods. We find that Rotterdam's majority ethnic groups experience cocooning, while minority groups tend not to. We also show that cocooning varies in intensity by geographical location and analytical scale, with peripheral, majority neighbourhoods exhibiting higher incidences of cocooning than central neighbourhoods.