Urban Racial Segregation Measures Comparison

Abstract

Urban racial segregation has been a problem to many U.S. cities. Many researchers have interested on the urban segregation issues since long time ago. To understand and plan a better community, urban planners needs to know how to measure the segregation and interpret the results. However, over the past several decades, many scientists have proposed many types of urban segregation measures. Although a few of them are commonly used nowadays, this doesn?t mean the other measures are not appropriate. Disregarding the fact that some of the measures are mostly used or easily calculated this paper attempts to gather many of the proposed and the most discussed measures for comparison. The results of the comparison were categorized in one group measure, two group measure, and multi group measure. They are also divided in to the five dimensions of segregation such as the evenness, exposure, concentration, clustering, and centralization. Two U.S. metropolitan cities that are different in racial proportion, Houston, TX and Philadelphia, PA, were selected for the comparison. All the selected measures are evaluated in several criteria such as the scale, level of measures, data required, level of complexity, and tendencies of using different census data.