Segregation-Sensitivity and Threshold-Dependency in Residential Segregation

Abstract

Residential segregation based on racial, ethnic, and religious affiliation poses serious threat to the inclusive development of a region. Policies for controlling segregation and establishing integration were formulated based on housing regulations and incentives but achieved marginal or at most partial success even when the secular democratic spirits demonstrated a steady rise in last few decades. The problem is likely to get aggravated due to the rise of a new wave of ethnic and religious intolerance worldwide. This motivates us to delve deeper into the internal mechanism of emergence of segregation and establish an ABM based computational framework that can be directly used for formulating efficient policies. In this paper, we introduce the concept of segregation-sensitivity and study its’ impact on overall segregation of settlements, having multidimensional asymmetry. Next, the impact of inter community threshold dependency is examined, especially for the scenario where a small increase in the homophily level of the majority community induces a larger increase in the homophily level of the minority. It has been observed that the effectiveness of the policy component, that focuses on campaign based homophily control, is highly dependent upon the existing embedded value of homophily within the population. However, our observation suggests that to achieve residential integration through such campaign, essentially combined with incentives for movement, controlling the homophily level of the majority community should be prioritized.