Does the bubble go beyond? An exploration of the urban filter bubble

The increasing prevalence of algorithms in our everyday lives has raised concerns about their societal effects. Algorithmic personalization is said to create filter bubbles that threaten democracy by curating the content users are exposed to. However, with our urban environments becoming increasingly digitally layered, they become scope of algorithmic curation as well. We therefore argue that the urban context should also be scope of algorithmic impact assessments to avoid the creation of urban filter bubbles; people only being exposed to a specific part of the city, which differs from what others see because of algorithmic personalization. In this paper, we present a methodology to assess the urban filter bubble hypothesis and perform a preliminary study to verify our approach.