Photo credit: Unequal Scenes by Johny Miller

Urban Inequality and Segregation Lab

The Urban Inequality and Segregation Lab brings together resources and researchers inspired to better understand how the spatial inequalities are produced and reproduced with ultimate goal to help to plan more inclusive, equitable and livable cities around the world.

Growing levels of socio-economic and ethnic segregation can seriously harm social inclusion and ethnic integration, economic competitiveness of cities, and increase concerns about safety and the intergenerational transmission of (dis)advantage. According to the ’Urban Agenda for the European Union’, high level of spatial segregation is one of the key challenges in European cities. However, our recent comparative book ’Urban Socio-Economic Segregation and Income Inequality: A Global Perspective’ shows that levels of inequality and segregation in Europe are lower than in most other parts of the world.

Segregation levels between socio-economic groups have grown in most large cities around the world, with the main geographic shift being the gentrification of the more affluent and suburbanization of the less affluent households. Employment opportunities are undergoing similar changes as the best-paying office jobs have concentrated to the downtown areas. As people with different incomes and employers providing different incomes cluster in urban space, other spatial opportunities change as well, leading to segregation in schools and leisure time activity sites as well as differential access to sustainable modes of mobility.

We are developing the conceptual framework of Vicious Circles of Segregation in order to better capture the (a) connectedness of segregation in all these different activity sites, in places of residence, in schools, at work, and in leisure time activity sites, and (b) various mechanisms that produce and reproduce segregation in these activity sites. These mechanisms may be summarized as follows.

First, individual characteristics such as income play an important role in sorting into different activity sites, and the contextual effects they gain these activity sites by interacting with other people.

Second, urban planning shapes the spatial distribution of homes and other key daily activity sites as well as the accessibility to these key activity sites from homes by different travel modes.

Third, aspatial policies that deal with overall income inequality, immigration, housing, labour market, educations and so on form the underlying structures that shape both individual sorting into activity sites as well as how the activity sites are distributed and accessed.