Urban Segregation Research Articles

Promoting a geography of opportunity in Accra, Ghana: Applying lessons from mixed-income development successes and shortcomings

ABSTRACT Urban poverty in both the developed and developing world is often spatially organized with deprivation highly concentrated in segregated areas of cities. With the rapid urbanization and lack of effective urban planning in several countries in sub-Saharan Africa, segregation, economic deprivation and social exclusion are particularly severe challenges. In the United States, almost 30 years of poverty deconcentration policy has had mixed results and offers cautions to other countries looking to confront urban segregation. Accra, the capital city of Ghana, offers an intriguing example of a city with substantial clusters of poverty and slum areas, but also some neighborhoods with high existing levels of economic integration. Drawing on the theoretical and empirical context of poverty deconcentration efforts in the United States, this paper presents a conceptual framework with two alternative pathways for urban development: an inclusionary pathway and an exclusionary pathway. We use this framework to review and critique Ghana’s existing urban policy and offer implications for inclusionary urban policy in Accra and other similar cities in developing countries.

Show me the money: Income inequality and segregation in UK cities

AbstractThe social geography of cities is argued to be changing globally; rising economic inequality is associated with increasing segregation. Yet, income inequality has been predominantly mobilised through national and regional imaginaries. In cities, a number of factors such as the normative policy motivation to intervene in ‘disadvantaged’ neighbourhoods, have led to (concentrations of) poverty becoming prioritised in empirical studies of household income. This paper addresses a gap in understanding the relationship between local income inequality and the segregation of high‐income households at the urban and neighbourhood scales in England and Wales. The results highlight that wealthier cities and districts (Cambridge, Winchester, and Rushcliffe in the Nottingham conurbation) have higher income inequality (Gini), but are less segregated (Index of Dissimilarity). Lower average income cities tend to be more segregated, due to self‐segregation of high‐income households into ‘pockets of affluence.’ These results confirm that high‐income households are the most segregated group in our sample, consistent with trends in global urban segregation patterns. The research also highlights just how prevalent low income is in urban neighbourhoods, making the case for high income as the designated minority population in segregation studies. In our detailed case study of Nottingham, income homogeneity is typical of areas with high deprivation. Neighbourhoods with a high Gini coefficient could be described as mixed income: the Gini is raised by the presence of high‐income households in urban neighbourhoods. We argue that the Gini therefore offers potential as an indicator of social mix in urban studies. These results are based on an experimental household income dataset released by the Office of National Statistics, with analysis of all core cities in England and Wales, alongside Derby, Leicester, Cambridge, Southampton, and Winchester, followed by a detailed case study of Nottingham (UK) and its extended suburban boundary.

Language and symbolic violence in computational models of ethnocentrism: A critical phenomenology and Southern re-orientations

Viewing code as heterogeneous language we offer an investigation of the relationship between language and symbolic violence in computational models of sociopolitical phenomena such as segregation and ethnocentrism. We offer a critical phenomenological account of how the transparency and ambiguity inherent in computational models of ethnocentrism embody and enact symbolic power and violence through assumptions of docility and omissions of marginalized voices and experiences. Centering voices of immigrants of color and Dalit scholars from the Global South, we present an empirical vignette as well as theoretical arguments that illustrate experiences of pain, oppression and erasure that underlie experiences of migration and urban segregation. Our work illustrates that dignity in learning is not independent of how dignity is represented computationally, and argues for a fundamental axiological re-orientation of computational ontologies toward Southern perspectives.

Urban Housing Inequity: Housing Deprivation and Social Response in the City of Naples

The growth of social inequality in recent decades has a strong urban dimension. In fact, cities are places where such inequalities grow quickly, and have a strong influence on the living conditions and perspectives of different social groups. In this sense, urban segregation becomes an important warning in assessing the existence of disparities that affect the most disadvantaged social groups. Therefore, the aim of this research was to outline the evidence of the phenomenon of residential segregation and housing insecurity on a European scale, and to analyze the case study of Naples, Italy, evaluating the presence of the phenomena of urban segregation and housing insecurity within through the creation of a synthetic index: the “Index of housing deprivation in the neighborhoods of the city of Naples”. After analyzing the extent of the phenomena, we took a step further, seeking to understand whether there have been responses from civil society through protest movements. Indeed, another objective of this paper was to understand why, in the city of Naples, there is no strong social response. In order to give an explanation, we will carry out a comparison with the action of the social movements of Barcelona.

A Critical Community Practice Theory for Forging Alliances across Difference

ABSTRACT Increasingly diversity practice skills are imperative to socially just practice in community. Conceptually driven constructs and approaches grounded in ideology dominate practice across difference in communities. This project centers a setting historically challenged by urban renewal, segregation, racism, and systemic oppression. Using critical grounded theory, authors develop a tentative practice theory to forge alliances across differences of power, identity, orientation, and/or culture from data derived in practice. Findings expose three core process dimensions: knowledge development, quality communication, and relationship care; key guiding components, practical skills, and barriers in each to guide evidence-informed community practice and expand the diversity practice lexicon.

Urban segregation and the socio-spatial dimension of sexual division of labor

Resumo O objetivo central do artigo consiste em caracterizar e analisar a dimensão socioespacial da divisão sexual do trabalho e seus impactos no cotidiano das mulheres. A literatura acadêmica sobre divisão sexual do trabalho parece não dar a devida atenção à maneira como a segregação urbana impacta na realização dos trabalhos produtivo e reprodutivo pelas mulheres. Valendo-se de revisão bibliográfica e dados empíricos de estudos recentes, o argumento central é que este processo afeta sobretudo as mulheres, e, especialmente, as mulheres negras e periféricas. Busca-se demonstrar que essas mulheres, que via de regra vivem nas áreas periféricas das cidades em decorrência dos processos de segregação urbana, despendem um tempo muito maior do seu cotidiano para a realização de ambos os trabalhos, produtivo e reprodutivo, sobretudo em razão dos deslocamentos que necessitam realizar.

The idea of a city for people as a factor in the localization of protest voting in new residential complexes

The gradual formation of income segregation in the post-Soviet city leads to the localization of protest voting. New residential complexes are significant spatial elements of this process. The new housing attracts citizens with similar income levels and perception of the quality of the living environment, empowering urban segregation. Moreover, the gap between expected and experienced urban life is usually observed in the new housing, supported by frequent practices of deceptive marketing and concluding real estate transactions long before the construction is over. Following that, the discrepancy between the character of the urban environment inside and outside the residential complex forces the localization of protest voting within the new housing. The key concept in explaining that kind of a protest vote localization is “city for people”. The external attributes of the city for people, including safety, accessibility, sustainability, are promoted by developers as part of marketing campaigns and shape a latent demand from the buyers. However, the systematic lack of these claimed elements in new residential complexes leads residents to political protest and focus on the political component of the city for people. Citizens adopt a critical attitude towards the infringement of the rights of residents by developers and urban administration and a request for equal participation in city management. The paper critically observes the case of protest voting in the residential complex «Ya - Romantik» in St Petersburg. The significant lack of infrastructure empowers citizens there to manifest political claims and exercise solidarity. Also the prospective locations of the protest voting are discussed.

Infrastructures of Race? Colonial Indigenous Zoning and Contemporary Urban Segregation

Infrastructures of Race? Colonial Indigenous Zoning and Contemporary Urban Segregation

Antibiotic ‘entanglements’: health, labour and everyday life in an urban informal settlement in Kampala, Uganda

ABSTRACT Antibiotics are a routine part of everyday life in many contexts, contributing to the development of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Our ethnographic research documents the ways that antibiotics have become a key part of everyday life for precariously employed urban day-wage workers living in a large informal settlement in Kampala, Uganda. We found that for many people, their daily work and ongoing health was entangled with antibiotic use; that is, people showed us how their antibiotic use cannot be separated from the realities of living in a politically, economically and environmentally degraded ‘informal’ landscape. Thinking through entanglement as itself a politics, we show how limited political power, inability to demand change, and inequitable access to good health care, are associated with high rates of infection and disease, precarious work, and polluted environments. Antibiotics, we argue, have become a way to negotiate the inequalities written into these informal urban landscapes; their use entangled with ongoing relations with labour, environment and bodily suffering. Through this approach, we show how antimicrobials are used in society, with an attention to how vulnerabilities, risks, and forms of abandonment and exclusion shape their everyday use. Antibiotic use is entangled with everyday life in informal settlements, and the politics that produce ‘informality’. In Kampala today, the entanglement of antibiotics with life in informal settlements reveals how forms of urban segregation, life in ‘slums’ and their everyday acceptance, shape the pathways and uses of antimicrobials.

Income sorting by specialized services: Service differentiation by overlapping governments

AbstractBackgroundThe flexible boundaries of special districts allow for overlaps with each other that generate various specialized service bundles on a territorial basis. The combined overlapping boundaries may reveal willingness to have more services at additional costs as the special districts generally provide services selectively to those who reside within their boundaries.ObjectiveThis study aims to investigate whether overlapping special districts sort citizens by income level as reflected by the Tiebout model.MethodsThis study utilizes a cross‐sectional block group data of Ventura County in California, taking numbers of vertices of special districts as independent variable and household income as dependent variable.ResultsEstimation result demonstrates that a greater number of specialized services is associated with higher income levels and varies by service type.ConclusionFindings of this study imply that income segregation could be predetermined by jurisdictional boundary, and that other subjects of urban segregation may have similar pattern.

The Politics of Differentiation and the Co‐Production of the “Model Periphery” in Brazil’s Public Housing

AbstractIn Latin America’s pink tide democracies, peripheries were pivotal openings into the ambiguities of political and economic urban governance. Once portrayed as territories of decay, state disregard, and societal oblivion, peripheries turned into key moral and spatial assemblages in Brazil’s post‐neoliberal project of a “de‐poored,” middle‐class country. This article draws on ethnographic research conducted in two peripheral Minha Casa Minha Vida projects—Brazil’s large‐scale public housing program—in the city of Porto Alegre. Charting the long‐term entanglements of local activism, communal hope, and national developmentalism, I argue that peripheral zones illuminate the ambivalences of state‐ and place‐making. Unveiling the politics of differentiation and distended governance that render one periphery a successful case of state and market intervention over the other, I explore how images of the “model periphery” are enforced through local infrastructures of worth and the effacement of its failed Other: the intractable faraway periphery, deemed to disappear in the name of public accountability and social and economic development. In conclusion, the article suggests that the consorted travails of leaders, citizen activists, politicians, and planners in casting visibility onto the model periphery contribute to bolstering and obscuring extant patterns of urban segregation and social inequality.

Low-income housing development in India: Strategies for income mixing and inclusive urban planning

ABSTRACT Federal housing programs in rapidly urbanizing countries like India are targeting the expansion of low-income housing stocks. However, most of these large-scale low-income housing developments occur in the urban peripheries, and they are cut off from opportunities and essential urban infrastructure. They not only indicate policy failure but also exacerbate urban segregation in growing cities. Federal policies to tackle these problems in India are geared toward relatively small-scale mixed-income initiatives like inclusionary housing and public-private partnerships. Evaluating these efforts based on four cases in the city of Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh, this paper expands the literature on social-mix and mixed-income housing initiatives that is dominated by studies from the Global North. It identifies multi-pronged approaches to address (1) the failure of the current Indian federal policy involving small-scale mixed-income initiatives, and (2) the need to integrate housing initiatives with urban development at multiple levels, especially in the urban peripheries.

Space‐Based Observational Constraints on NO2 Air Pollution Inequality From Diesel Traffic in Major US Cities

AbstractAir pollution disproportionately burdens communities of color and lower‐income communities in US cities. We have generally lacked city‐wide concentration measurements that resolve the steep spatiotemporal gradients of primary pollutants required to describe intra‐urban air pollution inequality. Here, we use observations from the recently launched TROPospheric Ozone Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) satellite sensor and physics‐based oversampling to describe nitrogen dioxide (NO2) disparities with race, ethnicity, and income in 52 US cities (June 2018–February 2020). We report average US‐urban census tract‐level NO2 inequalities of 28 ± 2% (race‐ethnicity and income combined), with many populous cities experiencing even greater inequalities. Using observations and inventories, we find diesel traffic is the dominant source of NO2 disparities, and that a 62% reduction in diesel emissions would decrease race‐ethnicity and income inequalities by 37%. We add evidence that TROPOMI resolves tract‐scale NO2 differences using relationships with urban segregation patterns and spatial variability in column‐to‐surface correlations.

Socio-economic level, neighborhood segregation and determinants of reciprocity: evidence using representative artefactual data from Latin American cities

ABSTRACT We study whether urban segregation is linked to social capital and, in particular, whether socio-economic level, measured by neighborhood of provenance, is detrimental to the formation of reciprocity. We employ representative data for six Latin American cities, an underrepresented region in terms of experimental research. Our main findings provide robust evidence that individuals with higher socio-economic level increasingly reward larger levels of trust in comparison to lower socio-economic level participants.

Urban Segregation in a Nordic Small Town in the Late-Seventeenth Century: Residential Patterns in Sortavala at the Eastern Borderland of the Swedish Realm

The general view of urban segregation in pre-modern towns has been that the wealthy lived near the administrative and economic center(s), while the poor were pushed to the limits of the town. This approach has been questioned by studies proving that urban spaces were socially mixed. This dilemma has been studied here by examining in detail the urban segregation in one small town, Sortavala, at the eastern borderland of the Swedish realm. The analysis shows that the town space was bipolarly segregated. The “gentry,” officeholders and the like, lived near the market square and town hall; the wealthy burghers along the main street. However, even the poorest taxpayers lived among the wealthy and those of high social rank. The segregation was relative: the proportion of the wealthy grew in the grid plan in the town center; the settlements growing “freely” outside the original grid plan were for the poor only.

Narratives of Home on the Fringe of Tehran: The Case of Shahriar County

Abstract This paper focuses on the notion of home as a narrative of one’s lived experience that clashes with planners’ understanding of housing and housing policies, using as a case study Shahriar County, located on the western fringe of the metropolitan area of Tehran. Following Heidegger, the feeling of home is a fundamental aspect of human existence. From this perspective, housing policies and spatial planning impact the sense of home in a geographical context. The empirical analysis is based on an overview of institutional changes since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and interviews with inhabitants of Shahriar. The results indicate that Iran has developed a particular form of neoliberal, speculative model of urban development, in which urban segregation and seclusion and uneven regional development are noteworthy. Consequently, the sense of home is structurally undermined on the metropolitan fringe, generating a feeling of living on the edge of the world.

Book Review of "The Cities, Security and Poverty"

The 2013 Meeting of the World Society for Ekistics was held in Ankara, Turkey around the theme of ‘The Cities, Security and Poverty’1. The proceedings from this international meeting, edited by Meltem Yılmaz and H. Çağatay Keskinok, form an overarching account of the changing power relations in a globalized world, discussing their socio-spatial implications for human settlements with particular reference to the key issues of the weakening public sphere and communality, increasing socio-spatial fragmentation and inequalities, and emerging security problems related to both political insurgencies and environmental degradation. Although the content of the book is not structured around certain sub-headings or themes, it is possible to categorize the 18 distinctive contributions as follows: (i) changing power relations and their implications on the public sphere; (ii) spatial manifestations of changing power relations and urban segregation; (iii) crime and security problems in urban spaces; (iv) ecological transitions, sustainability issues and environmental disasters.

Urban segregation and consumption inequality: Does hukou conversion matter in China?

AbstractThis paper develops a simple theoretical model and offers empirical evidence of urban segregation on consumption inequality between rural‐to‐urban migrants and urban residents. Our analyses are based on the 2007 China Household Income Project (CHIP) and the 2017 China Migrants Dynamics Survey (CMDS) data. Results obtained from propensity score matching and 2SLS methods show that urban segregation caused by the hukou system leads to significant consumption inequality between rural‐to‐urban migrants and urban residents. Hukou conversion matters for improving migrants’ consumption, but when or how hukou was transferred makes little difference. Besides, we find that the disparity in consumption between rural‐to‐urban migrants and urban residents is more prominent in the higher‐income group or in cities with stricter restrictions on hukou conversion. Finally, our results are robust to a series of sensitivity checks.

Segregation Surfaces

Summary Social scientists have developed dozens of different ways to quantify urban segregation with numerical statistics. Behind the scenes, some of these measurements are defined using multivariable functions that model the distribution of various groups in a geographical region. Using Bayes’ theorem and kernel density estimation, we describe how to summarize population data in terms of smooth, two-dimensional surfaces. These surfaces give us ways of identifying neighborhood boundaries and visualizing segregation patterns. We also propose two new segregation measures using some familiar tools from third-semester calculus. Applications to United States census data are included.

Comparing paratransit in seven major African cities: An accessibility and network analysis

Accessibility to transit, together with other important system characteristics such as network coverage and frequency, is a crucial driver of modal choice for urban commuting. In turn, commuting is a major driver of energy consumption and of socio-environmental externalities in cities. So far, few quantitative and comparative assessments of paratransit in cities of Africa have been carried out due to data scarcity and the prevalence of informal services. Here we leverage the recent release of General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data to produce comparative metrics of accessibility, network, and service quality of paratransit in seven major cities in sub-Saharan Africa (Abidjan, Accra, Addis Ababa, Freetown, Harare, Kampala, Nairobi). Our results allow for a first-order assessment and comparison of different crucial paratransit characteristics in these cities, shedding light on transport inequality and urban segregation dynamics. The analysis and metrics produced can support transport systems planners in major cities of low-income countries. Further research should focus on approaches for overcoming the residual data limitations and expand the quantitative understanding of paratransit.