Urban Economic SEGregation: integrating explanatory mechanisms across geographical scales to compare remediatory policies in silico

Introduction

The uneven concentration of people and economic resources in cities hampers the well-being and opportunities of poorer citizens and represents a threat to social cohesion. It is considered a major policy challenge by researchers and international institutions alike.

Project Aim

My aim with the SEGUE project is to identify and model the combination of economic, geographical, and demographical drivers of urban economic segregation in order to better understand its dynamics and to better assess possible remediatory policies.

Literature Review

The existing literature on urban segregation mainly explains urban economic segregation with sociological and intra-city factors, including:

• Resource accessibility
• Social networks
• Contextual effects
• Urban form

It also acknowledges a link with the evolution of economic inequality.

In contrast, the existing literature on economic inequality mainly focuses on factors operating at the national and individual levels, such as:

1. Selective migration
2. Assortative mating
3. Family inheritance
4. Education

Addressing the Gap

My project addresses this gap by spatializing the national and individual explanations of economic inequality relating to:

• Residential mobility
• The tax system
• The education system

It integrates these factors into a simulation model of urban segregation.

Methodology

This model will be calibrated with a uniquely rich source of exhaustive and longitudinal individual data from the Netherlands. Its analysis will produce new insights about the interaction between drivers of economic inequality and segregation in cities.

Policy Implications

The project will provide a cost-effective tool to compare policies aimed at reducing urban economic segregation at different scales of action (local, urban, national), ex ante (i.e., within the virtual laboratory of a simulation) instead of in situ with costly and risky experiments.

Conclusion

The results obtained from the research should also open new perspectives to study various forms of inequality and facilitate the study of economic segregation in other national contexts.