Social boundaries and the (re)production of urban economic inequalities: a relational perspective of segregation

Despite the abundance of boundaries in urban space, such as administrative boundaries, social boundaries, neighbourhood boundaries, physical boundaries, school boundaries, etc., mainstream segregation theories often underestimate their significance. Early models in the literature by Schelling (1971) and Yinger (1976) focused on how boundaries emerged as the product of individual preferences and the residential movements of households. A quantitative approach that conceptualizes a boundary as an object in itself, rather than just a demarcation of another entity, has gained attention more recently in geography (Campari, 1996), geographic epidemiology (Jacquez, 2010), ecology (Fortin, 1992) and in spatial sciences in general (Jacquez et al., 2000).

In this presentation I advance the social boundaries perspective in segregation research theoretically and empirically. The approach hypothesises that sharper socioeconomic transitions between adjacent areas are associated with stronger discontinuities of social networks between distinct social groups and lower levels of local economic activity, conditions that traditional segregation measures fail to capture. As such, social boundaries may be linked to segregation by demarcating reduced levels of social interactions between social groups, potentially reinforcing, reverting or weakening segregation patterns.

I present preliminary results analysing the association between ethnic boundaries and company location in London. Results, show that overall, the steeper the change between areas of different ethnic composition, the lower the presence of companies is expected. More specifically, areas with strong transitions from British Asian to Black African-Caribbean areas are associated with a lower density of companies. The opposite is true for areas with strong White-British Asian boundaries.