Residential segregation of the elderly in West-German cities

Abstract

In the Course of the growing perception of the ageing populations in Western societies, and of the gerontologists' growing 'environmental consciousness' more attention has been paid to the physical distribution of age groups. This rapid Change in the focus of attention c an be illustrated by the fact that until the 1970s German social-scientists were convinced that Segregation processes were not an important feature in German cities. Recently, however, several studies by human ecologists and urban sociologists have provcd that cities in the FRG are subject to significant spatial-sorting processes. These processes have produced considerable spatial Separation of some categories of homeless people ('Obdachlose') and of the working migrants ('Gastarbeiter') (cf. the summarized results in Vaskovics, 1976; Hoffmann-Nowotny and Hondrich, 1981). Our research(1) started from the assumption that people of old age are affected by Segregation processes as well. This view is supported by statements of social workers and experts of old-age Services who state that some neighbourhoods have too many elderly, resulting in an 'unsound' population structure or in old-age ghettos. These Statements normally are based more on subjective impressions than on empirically verified data, so it seerns worthwhile to explore this topic more thoughly. The concepts of concentration, Segregation, and spatial distance Since the development of human ecology in the early - twentieth century a specific methodology and terminology has been established to describe and to analyse spatial processes and structures. The descriptive h ypotheses belcw concern spatial s tructures, the analyticai hypotheses are about processes in space. T he s patial r eference - unit is the City, subdivided into subunits, like districts, zones or blocks. As soon as we know the Proportion of a certain age-group or age category in such a subunit and can compare it with the City-wide proportion of this age group we have a measure of this age group's degree of concentration. So concentration refers to the spatial subunit. The measurement of Segregation takes into consideration all subunits and compares the actual Proportion of the observed age-group with a hypothetical equal distribution over the subunits. If the a ge group is distributed equally a Segregation Score of 0 will result; if it is concentrated in only a few subunits a value of 100 or near 100 will be computed. The sociological relevance of Segregation indices is based on the as