Urban Socio-economic Segregation and Income Inequality, A Global Perspective

The World’s Cities Are Becoming More Unequal

Urban Socio-Economic Segregation and Income Inequality – An Open Access Publication with a Gobal Perspective

After being three years in the making, this week the new book ‘Urban Socio-Economic Segregation and Income Inequality. A Global Perspective’ came out as a Springer OPEN publication. The book is edited by Maarten van Ham, Tiit Tammaru, Rūta Ubarevičienė and Heleen Janssen, and it is completely open access and free to download. The book includes 24 case studies from large urban regions in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. The book can be downloaded here: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64569-4

Worldwide, levels of socio-economic segregation in cities are increasing and as a result the rich and the poor an increasingly living in different parts of urban regions. In a new book researchers Maarten van Ham and colleagues explain the relationship between increasing levels of inequality and segregation. This relationship is important because the places where people live have a direct effect on their social mobility and well-being. The rising levels of inequality and segregation pose huge challenges for the future social sustainability in cities. 

In April 2021, the book Urban Socio-Economic Segregation and Income Inequality, A Global Perspective will be published. The book includes 24 case studies from large urban regions in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America.

Professor Maarten van Ham: “Actually, you see similar patterns all over the world. The more unequal societies are, the further apart the rich and the poor live from one another. In higher income countries we see the affluent part of the urban population moving to the city centre, while those without much money move to the outer edges of the urban region. This is a reversal of the suburbanisation trends of the 1970s, when many of the higher income groups moved to a house with a garden in the suburbs. In lower income countries we see similar patterns emerge, with the rich concentrating in enclaves.”

Global trend
If this study demonstrates anything, it’s that the relationship between income inequality and segregation is almost universal. Rising inequalities lead to rising levels of socio-economic segregation almost everywhere in the world. Levels of inequality and segregation are higher in cities in lower income countries, but the growth in inequality and segregation over the last decades has been faster in cities in high-income countries. This implies that if this trend continues, cities in higher income countries move closer to the levels of inequality as they are now in low-income countries.

It is a global trend that the rich are moving to the centre of urban regions, while poverty is sub-urbanising. An important factor which explains this trend is the professionalisation of the urban workforce. This means that the share of high income and high-status jobs is increasing at the expense of the share of the lower income and status groups. This is important for our understanding of spatial patterns as high-income workers have a preference to live in centrally located and attractive areas. A conclusion that can be drawn from the book is that past planning decisions clearly have a major impact on contemporary spatial patterns of inequality.

The book offers a unique global overview of segregation trends based on case studies by local author teams. The book can be downloaded for free from Springer!

The editors are:
Maarten van Ham: Professor of Urban Geography and the head of the Department of Urbanism, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology and Professor of Geography at the University of St Andrews in the UK.

Tiit Tammaru: Profesoor of Urban and Population Geography and the Head of the Chair of Human Geography at the Department of Geography, University of Tartu.

Rūta Ubarevičienė: Researcher with a background in urban and regional geography and sociology working at the Urban Studies research group of the Department of Urbanism, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology and at the Department of Regional and Urban Studies at the Institute of Sociology, Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences

Heleen Janssen is Assistant Professor in the Urban Studies research group of the Department of Urbanism, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology. She is a social scientist with a background in Sociology and Criminology.