How Can We Measure Social Segregation Outside of Residential Areas?
Ethnic segregation as spatial separation of some population groups from others is one of the most important population processes in urban areas. Segregation of minorities is usually deemed to be negative because the isolation is associated with problems in education, employment, poverty, safety, and health care . A traditional analysis of segregation on the basis of a study of activity places (residence, place of work, leisure) may not show the complete picture of the population processes because the activities may take place across many different places or activities. Thus, researches have increasingly highlighted the need to study segregation in the whole extent of the places of activity of people and in the whole extent of the 24-hour activity cycle. Such studies are becoming possible and interesting in connection with taking into use of various modern tracking data, which enable to observe people ubiquitously in time and space. The use of such data is limited by many restrictions related to the right of use of the data and privacy. There are also huge methodological and theoretical challenges. How to enrich quantitative tracking data to a level interesting to modern social sciences? How to make space-time tracking data statistically processable? How to interpolate them spatially and temporally?
Rein Ahas
University of Tartu
Faculty of Science and Technology
Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences
