The uneven concentration of economic resources in cities hampers the well-being and opportunities of poorer citizens and represents a threat to social cohesion. It is considered a major policy challenge by researchers and international institutions alike. With the SEGUE project, we aim to identify and model theÍ combination of major economic, geographic, sociological and demographical drivers of urban economic segregation in order to better understand its dynamics and to better assess possible remediatory policies.
The existing literature on urban economic segregation mainly explains it with sociological intra-city factors (e.g. access to resources, social networks, role models) but also acknowledges that it depends on the evolution of economic inequality. The existing literature on economic inequality, by contrast, mainly focuses on factors operating at the national and individual levels (e.g. selective migration, assortativity, inheritance).
In SEGUE we address the gap between these two bodies of literature by first spatialising the national and individual explanations of economic inequality. This means focusing on where people are, live in or move to, because those locations constrain who one can meet, whether romantically, professionally or simply as friends and acquaintances. Second, SEGUE addresses the gap in literature by integrating multiple and multidisciplinary explanations into a simulation model of urban economic segregation. This model will be calibrated using a uniquely rich source of exhaustive and longitudinal individual data from the Netherlands (CBS microdata). Its analysis will produce new insights about the interaction between drivers of economic inequality and segregation in cities and will provide a cost-effective tool to compare policy scenarios to reduce urban economic segregation at different scales of action (local policies, metropolitan or national ones).
The results obtained with this project should open new perspectives to study other forms of inequality (gender, race, class) and facilitate the study of economic segregation in other national contexts (e.g. countries with less granular data).
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