A comparative study of immigrant-native segregation at multiple spatial scales in urban Europe

ABSTRACT

There has been a strong degree of interest over the last 30 years towards immigrant segregation in Europe. This paper aims to contribute towards the existing body of research by extending the multi-scalar analysis of patterns of immigrant residential segregation into a coherent international comparative study of cities of different sizes. We investigate the patterns of immigrant-native segregation at different geographical scales, along with their correlates, in more than a hundred cities in 2011 across Germany, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Our findings suggest that cities in the UK are the most highly segregated in Europe. The positions of the other countries in the ‘European segregation ranking’ depend upon the considered immigrant group and spatial scale. The national context is consistently the most important factor in understanding segregation at multiple spatial scales. However, even while taking into account the national contexts, the structural-ecological factors remain important predictors of segregation patterns in Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigrants
• segregation
• spatial scale
• cities
• Europe

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The bi-weighted kernel density function is formulated as follows (Lan, Kandt, and Longley 2020): ${\tilde{\pi }}_{pm}={\displaystyle \frac{\int {}_{q\in R}^{}{\tau }_{qm}\phi \left(p,q\right)\mathrm{d}q}{\int {}_{q\in R}^{}{\tau }_q\phi \left(p,q\right)\mathrm{d}q}.}$ $\phi \left(p,q\right)=\{\begin{array}{c}{\left[1-{\left({\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{d}(p,q}{r}}\right)}^2\right]}^2,\mathrm{d}\left(p,q\right)\le r;\\ 0,\mathrm{d}\left(p,q\right)>r.\end{array}$${\tilde{\pi }}_{pm}$ represents the proportion of group m in the neighbourhood around p amongst the total population in the same neighbourhood, where ${\tau }_{qm}$ and ${\tau }_q$ denote the population density of group m and the population density of all groups at all other locations q, which fall into the radius r from p.

Additional information

Funding

The research leading to these results received funding from the Estonian Research Council [PUT PRG306 and Infotechnological Mobility Laboratory].