Residential Segregation in Finnish Cities: A Comparative Perspective

Keywords: residential area classification, socioeconomic segregation, dissimilarity index, income, education, unemployment
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 57

Abstract

Residential segregation between socioeconomic groups is a widely acknowledged phenomenon. Related problems are most pronounced in the largest metropolitan regions, but they also arise in smaller urban areas. Nevertheless, the focus of academic segregation studies tends to be in the major cities. In this study, we first create a residential area classification based on the qualities of residential building stock for the 20 largest cities in Finland. Second, we utilize the created classification to compare residential segregation between socioeconomic groups in these urban areas.

Our analysis is based on comprehensive location-based registry data from Finland at the cross-section years of 2000 and 2018. Specifically, the residential area classification relies on 250 m x 250 m grid data on buildings maintained by the Finnish Environment Institute while dissimilarity indexes for income, education, and unemployment are computed using individual level registry data from Statistics Finland.
Compared to previous studies, our approach with similar areal units in smaller and larger cities allows a more solid basis for studying socioeconomic segregation. Our results show some differences to previous studies that are mostly based on more vague areal units, such as zipcodes.

We find that segregation has mostly increased in the studied cities, but the magnitude varies with the cities and indicators. Furthermore, the results show that the size of the city does not directly correlate with the level of segregation, which speaks in favor of implementing city level policies against segregation. In general, segregation in Finnish cities is still relatively moderate.