Residential distribution in the city - Reexamined

The recent boom in high-resolution GIS makes possible the investigation of urban residential distributions at the resolution of individual buildings and families. Availability of these data has inspired reexamination of the Schelling model of residential segregation and its application for simulating population patterns in real cities. The current paper argues that the Schelling model satisfies this criterion and consequently applies it to explain real-world residential pattern dynamic in nine Israeli cities. The study is based on data obtained from a unique Israeli census database in which individual and family records are geo-referenced to the layer of buildings. Analysis of the income-based residential patterns reveals their high heterogeneity - a mix of homo- and heterogeneous areas is typical for eight of the nine cities investigated. We explain this heterogeneity by the presence of a low fraction of wealthier householders who are highly tolerant of their poorer neighbors and can thus reside in their proximity. Extension of the model in this direction results in a qualitative correspondence between the model's outcomes and the residential patterns observed in Israeli cities.