SEGUE · Urban Economic SEGregation: integrating explanatory mechanisms across geographical scales to compare remediatory policies in silico

The uneven concentration of people and 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. My aim with the SEGUE project is to identify and model the combination of economic, geographical 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 segregation mainly explains urban economic segregation with sociological and intra-city factors (resource accessibility, social networks, contextual effects and the urban form) but also acknowledges a link with the evolution of economic inequality. The existing literature on economic inequality, by contrast, mainly focuses on factors operating at the national and individual levels (selective migration, assortative mating, family inheritance, education). My project addresses this gap by spatialising the national and individual explanations of economic inequality relating to residential mobility or the tax and education system, and by integrating these into a simulation model of urban segregation. This model will be calibrated with a uniquely rich source of exhaustive and longitudinal individual data from the Netherlands. 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 policies to reduce urban economic segregation at different scales of action (local, urban, national), ex ante (i.e. within the virtual laboratory of a simulation) instead of in situ with costly and risky experiments. The results obtained from the research should also open new perspectives to study various forms of inequality and facilitate the study of economic segregation in other national contexts.