All of Scioteca
Communities & Collections By Issue Date Authors Titles Subjects Country / Region
Profiles
Our Authors
My Account
Login

What is the Role of Urban Growth on Inequality, and Segregation? The Case of Urban Argentina´s Urban Agglomerations

We analyze the relationship between urban sprawl and changing patterns of inequality and segregation in metropolitan areas of Argentina. The existing literature has endeavored to study the determinants of the expansion of cities, but less attention has been placed in understanding the effects of this sprawl on the livelihood of the people that live in them. Understanding whether different patterns of urban extension determine both segregation and inequality is extremely relevant in the context of fast growing urban agglomerates of Latin American countries. Among other findings, we provide evidence that there is segregation of the poor and not of the rich in all urban agglomerates but in Greater Buenos Aires, where segregation of the affluent, not the poor, prevails in the areas of greater informal urban expansion, measured by the extension of informal settlements. Yet, not all the patterns of urban development and built-up growth have the same effect. More leapfrog appears to explain greater segregation -particularly of the poor- while both infill and extension are positively related to more homogeneous urban agglomerations. This means that the most disadvantaged are more evenly distributed in agglomerations that have not seen much of their sprawl due to discontinue urban expansion of their borders. Finally, we also find a positive association between more unequal municipalities and greater slum expansions. The causality of this relationship is unclear and further analysis could be promising. It might be the case that more unequal municipalities allow for institutional environments in which slums can grow faster. Or it might well be that places which have experienced more accelerated slum growth have become more unequal because of the arrival of new families that accentuates such disparities.

Abstract

Description

Subject

Ciudades | Desarrollo social | Desarrollo urbano | Economía | Equidad e inclusión social | Investigación socioeconómica | Pobreza

País / Región

Argentina

URI

https://scioteca.caf.com/handle/123456789/972

Date

2016-11

Cite from this publication

Collections

6.1 Documentos de trabajo en investigación socioeconómica

Endorsement

Review

Supplemented By

Referenced By

Creative Commons license

CC-BY-NC
Except where otherwised noted, this item's license is described as CC-BY-NC
Thumbnail Image

Files

Goytia Dorna (2016).pdf (5.38 MB)

Authors

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

CAF

Related Items

Thumbnail Image
Income Segregation and Urban Spatial Structure: Evidence from Brazil

We estimate the effect of urban spatial structure on income segregation in Brazilian cities between 2000 and 2010. Our results show that, first, local density...

Thumbnail Image
Evaluating the Impact of Buenos Aires’s Metrobus on Within-City Spatial Sorting

How do improvements in the urban transport infrastructure affect the spatial sorting of residents with different levels of in-come and education within a city? What...

Thumbnail Image
City Size, Distance and Formal Employment Creation

Cities thrive through the diversity of their occupants because the availability of complementary skills enables firms in the formal sector to grow, delivering increasingly sophisticated...

Thumbnail Image
Determinants of Slum Formation: The Role of Local Politics and Policies

One-third of the developing world’s population lives in urban slums and the absolute number of slum residents grew from 650 million in 1990 to 863...

Thumbnail Image
The Political Economy of Slum Growth: Evidence from Brazil

One-fourth of the world’s urban population lives in slums and the number of slum residents grew from 650 million in 1990 to 1 billion in...

Thumbnail Image
Measuring the size and growth of cities using nighttime light

This paper uses high-resolution images of nighttime luminosity to estimate a globally comparable measure of the size of metropolitan areas around the world for the...