Abstract
Creating inclusive cities requires meaningful responses to inequality and segregation. We build an agent-based model of interactions between wealth and ethnicity of agents to investigate ‘dual’ segregations—due to ethnicity and due to wealth. As agents are initially allowed to move into neighbourhoods they cannot afford, we find a regime where there is marginal increase in both wealth segregation and ethnic segregation. However, as more agents are progressively allowed entry into unaffordable neighbourhoods, we find that both wealth and ethnic segregations undergo sharp, non-linear transformations, but in opposite directions—wealth segregation shows a dramatic decline, while ethnic segregation an equally sharp upsurge. We argue that the decrease in wealth segregation does not merely accompany, but actually drives the increase in ethnic segregation. Essentially, as agents are progressively allowed into neighbourhoods in contravention of affordability, they create wealth configurations that enable a sharp decline in wealth segregation, which at the same time allow co-ethnics to spatially congregate despite differences in wealth, resulting in the abrupt worsening of ethnic segregation.
Highlights
The UN predicts that global urban population will grow by an estimated 2.5 billion until 2050 [1]
We find a slight increase in Fraction of Rich Neighbours (FR) as DisallowedRealised ratio initially increases, before the sharp transformation from a segregated to a mixed-wealth configuration
What our results suggest is that the dynamics of interaction between wealth and ethnicity of agents could yield opposing segregation tendencies, meaning that a highly wealth segregated configuration would correspond to low ethnic segregation, and a mixed wealth configuration would correspond to high ethnic segregation
Summary
The UN predicts that global urban population will grow by an estimated 2.5 billion until 2050 [1]. We are already seeing the increasing intensification of inequality in the form of wealth-based and ethnicity-based segregations in cities across the world. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals explicitly call for cities to be made inclusive and safe [2]. Making cities inclusive requires meaningful responses to the underlying challenges of inequality and segregation. The Cambridge dictionary defines segregation [3] as the phenomenon of keeping one group of people apart from another and treating them differently, especially because of race or sex. We focus on two kinds of urban segregation: wealth segregation, which is the spatial separation of rich and poor, and ethnic segregation, which is the spatial separation of people by ethnicity (including race, caste, religion, ethnic origin or language)
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