Urban skylines from Schelling model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a metapopulation Schelling model to analyze urban segregation, revealing how varying tolerance levels lead to different segregation patterns and stable heterogeneous skylines.

Contribution

It presents a novel metapopulation version of the Schelling model, combining numerical simulations with analytical insights into segregation dynamics.

Findings

Heterogeneous skylines emerge at low tolerance levels.

Three regimes of segregation identified: microscopic, soft, and hard.

Model behavior characterized by numerical and analytical methods.

Abstract

We propose a metapopulation version of the Schelling model where two kinds of agents relocate themselves, with unconstrained destination, if their local fitness is lower than a tolerance threshold. We show that, for small values of the latter, the population redistributes highly heterogeneously among the available places. The system thus stabilizes on these heterogeneous skylines after a long quasi-stationary transient period, during which the population remains in a well mixed phase. Varying the tolerance passing from large to small values, we identify three possible global regimes: microscopic clusters with local coexistence of both kinds of agents, macroscopic clusters with local coexistence (soft segregation), macroscopic clusters with local segregation but homogeneous densities (hard segregation). The model is studied numerically and complemented with an analytical study in the limit of extremely large node capacity.