Residential attitudes and segregation processes (WESP)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Sören Petermann
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 536180574

The research project deals with processes of residential segregation in cities. The focus is on residential attitudes, i.e. preferences about and satisfaction with characteristics of the living environment from the perspective of residents and households, their selective relocation behaviour and the modelling of resulting segregation processes. The aim of the research project is to deepen the understanding of segregation processes in three main areas. The theoretical modelling of the processes is to be further developed through more realistic assumptions about residential attitudes and framework conditions. This will be achieved through empirical analyses of residential attitudes, the results of which will be incorporated into agent-based modelling. Firstly, it is about describing the preference distributions for the ethnic composition of the residential environment as well as its conditioning factors and the change in ethnic residential preferences. Secondly, the racial proxy hypothesis, according to which ethnic composition as a single indicator sufficiently describes the residential situation in an area, is to be tested for the German context. Whether, in addition to ethnic composition, social composition and socially relevant infrastructures of the living environment are relevant for residential attitudes will be tested with longitudinal analyses. In essence, the aim is to compare residential satisfaction as a function of ethnic, social, and infrastructural environment conditions before and after a relocation. For the analysis of these two subgoals, data from high-quality national surveys (ALLBUS and SOEP) that have already been collected but not yet analysed will be used. Thirdly, the empirical findings on the distribution of residential attitudes and on resident mobility will be used for the development of agent-based simulation models. These simulations model realistic segregation processes from which conclusions on development lines and efficient modification possibilities can be derived.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants