A Spatially Extended Model for Residential Segregation

Abstract

We analyze urban spatial segregation phenomenon in terms of the income distribution over a population, and an inflationary parameter weighting the evolution of housing prices. For this, we develop a discrete spatially extended model based on a multiagent approach. In our model, the mobility of socioeconomic agents is driven only by the housing prices. Agents exchange location in order to fit their status to the cost of their housing. On the other hand, the price of a particular house depends on the status of its tenant, and on the neighborhood mean lodging cost weighted by a control parameter. The agent's dynamics converges to a spatially organized configuration, whose regularity is measured by using an entropy-like indicator. This simple model provides a dynamical process organizing the virtual city, in a way that the population inequality and the inflationary parameter determine the degree of residential segregation in the final stage of the process, in agreement with the segregation-inequality thesis put forward by Douglas Massey.