Segregation and the Structure of Cities

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Abstract: Recently, the issue of social divide has - partly due to the rise of populist movements in a variety of countries - moved to the forefront of the political agenda. Social divide has an important spatial dimension: the segregation of individuals by observable characteristics. In this paper, we examine the extent and dynamics of segregation between workers and the unemployed in Germany and relate it to the changing structure of cities. Drawing on a large set of geo-referenced data, we show that, similar to the US, unemployment has in the past predominantly been concentrated in the urban centers. This pattern has changed over the last decade with the rise of the ‘consumer city’ and with workers increasingly moving to the city centers. Despite this equalizing process, the level of segregation has risen during the same period. This can be attributed to the changing nature of segregation, where workers and unemployed tend to increasingly live in homogeneous, small-scale neighborhoods. Joint paper with Philipp vom Berge (Institute for Employment Research, Germany