This winter I’m taking a course on urban education. Our first
topic: segregation and desegregation in schools. Firstly, what
do we mean by segregation? As a working definition, I’ll offer
that segregation is the spatial pattern of people across some
attribute. So we could talk about segregation by race, by
income, or by favorite ice cream flavor. Once we pick something
to measure against, we find that every city is segregated
according to this definition. What matters is in what way the
segregation manifests and the consequences on the populace the
pattern has. Segregation patterns can be uniform, with all
groups distributed more or less evenly within a region, or
clustered. Likewise, we could also calculate the extent to which
subpopulations are isolated from each other—which also gives a
rough estimation of how often members of one group is likely to
run into someone outside of their group. I think when we talk
about ‘segregated’ groups, we typically mean highly clustered
populations that are isolated from