Income and immigrant segregation in urban Spain

Abstract

Over the last few decades, socio-spatial disparities in urban Europe have developed in two key ways. On one hand, income inequality has increased worldwide, and this trend has been reflected in growing economic/income residential segregation. Meanwhile, there has been an unprecedented inflow of immigrants to Europe, especially in the last decade. As most existing studies in this field in Europe focus on larger issues, not only is our knowledge of the processes that shape residential segregation patterns limited to a highly specific group of urban areas (generally capital cities), but the available studies also usually focus on one aspect of residential segregation, either economic segregation or immigrant segregation. Consequently, we investigated levels of segregation in the 124 most highly populated cities in Spain, where 47% of the country’s population resided in 2021, measuring dissimilarity indices related to economic status and immigrant status. Using census tract and municipality level data, we explored the main structural determinants of segregation levels, measuring levels of residential segregation using the dissimilarity index (D). Based on three seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) models, we specified the effect of the economic and demographic characteristics of cities on residential segregation. The results of our study reveal that the structural characteristics of urban regions are, in fact, significant predictors of the intensity of income segregation and immigrant segregation in urban areas in Spain. They also show that the recovery from the 2008 crisis in Spain has led to a chronic persistence of income and immigrant segregation.