GEOG Seminar 4/20: Elijah Knaap, "Segregated by Design? The Effect of Street Network Topological Structure on the Measurement of Urban Segregation"

Join us for our weekly seminar this Thursday, April 20 from 3:45 to 5 p.m. in River Road or via Zoom! Dr. Elijah Knaap at San Diego State University will discuss his research on the relationship between segregation measures and urban design features.

Abstract:

Racial residential segregation is a longstanding topic of focus across the disciplines of urban social science. Classically, segregation indices are calculated based on areal groupings (e.g., counties or census tracts), with more recent research exploring ways that spatial relationships can enter the equation.

Spatial segregation measures embody the notion that proximity to one’s neighbors is a better specification of residential segregation than simply who resides together inside the same arbitrarily drawn polygon. Thus, they expand the notion of “who is nearby” to include those who are geographically close to each polygon rather than a binary inside/outside distinction. Yet spatial segregation indices often resort to crude measurements of proximity, such as the Euclidean distance between observations, given the complexity and data requirements of calculating more theoreticallyappropriate measures, such as distance along the pedestrian travel network. In this talk, I will discuss the ramifications of such decisions.

The talk will focus on new empirical research using computational statistics and travel network analysis to examine the relationship between segregation measures and urban design features. For each metropolitan region in the U.S., we compute both Euclidean and network- based spatial segregation indices. We use a novel inferential framework to examine the statistical significance of the difference between the two measures, and following that, we use features of the network topology (e.g., connectivity, circuity, throughput) to explain this difference using a series of regression models. We show that there is often a large difference between segregation indices when measured by these two strategies (which is frequently significant). Further, we explain which topology measures reduce the observed gap and discuss implications for urban planning and design paradigms.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Elijah Knaap is a Senior Research Scientist and the Associate Director of the Center for Open Geographical Science at San Diego State University. He studies social inequality and spatial structure in neighborhoods, cities, and regions. His research focuses on topics including spatial inequality dynamics, segregation, neighborhood effects, fair housing policy, economic geography, public health, and urban modeling. This work advances the state of applied spatial data science to inform urban policy and planning with rigorous, reproducible, and spatially explicit methods. As a result, Dr. Knaap develops and maintains several widely-used open-source software packages for spatial statistics, neighborhood dynamics, and segregation analysis.

Zoom Info: Please reach out to ushaship@umd.edu for Zoom meeting information.