The Spatial Dynamics of Inequality: Mapping Socioeconomic Segregation and Fragmentation in Major Spanish Metropolitan Areas.

One of the major challenges to social cohesion is the rise of inequality within large urban areas, alongside the expansion of segregated/vulnerable spaces on smaller scales. The territorial articulation of socioeconomic inequalities in major European metropolises has been shaped by the provision of housing for the working-class that filled labor demand and industrial development until the 1980s. This process led to the creation of vast public and private affordable housing developments, often located in peripheral areas and isolated from other social groups.

Distance and segregation became key markers of socially impoverished conditions, and quantification tools such as the Index of Segregation (IS) were crucial in assessing their intensity and highlighting urban inequalities.

In recent decades, liberal governance has slowed the development of large-scale affordable housing projects, but has not stopped the influx of economic migrants experiencing precarious living conditions. This process has led to a gradual transformation of both the national and ethnic composition of the working class and a fragmentation of their territorial distribution. Thus, there is now a growing need for more effective quantification methods to better capture and address this evolving reality.

This communication, emanated from the ongoing project “Sociospatial Fragmentation in Spanish Urban Areas: Challenges and Proposals for Social Cohesion”, presents a comparative analysis of the territorial patterns of socio-spatial segregation and fragmentation, based on the calculation of the segregation index and a proposal for the quantification and cartographic analysis of fragmentation using spatial autocorrelation measures (LISA). The study examines both the distribution of populations by income, as well as foreign-born populations from the UK, Romania, Morocco, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Pakistan comparing the 5 main urban areas of Spain: Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, Seville, and Valencia in order to analyse whether different immigrant groups by origin present different patterns of segregation/fragmentation.