Divided Cities by OECD

Author:OECD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Issues/Migration/Health/Urban, Rural and Regional Development
ISBN: 9789264300385
Publisher: OECD Publishing
Published: 2018-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

Box 4.2. Segregation in geographical and social spaces

Besides the classical assimilation versus pluralist models of integration a third model introduced by Zelinsky (Zelinsky and Lee, 1998) and named heterolocalism considers how the increasing availability of means of communication allow establishing and preserving strong socio cultural ties independently from residential locations. Although formulated in 1998 this model anticipated the importance of social media in maintaining relations and defining a social space which overcomes geographical proximity constrains. With this model a pluralist society may coexist with a spatial pattern of dispersion.

The heterolocalism model has a correspondence at international level in the idea of transnationalism, whereby identity and cohesive communities are formed and maintained across national boundaries. Both heterolocalism and transationalism show the importance of considering a more encompassing dimension of social space than just focusing on where people live. In fact, the research frontier about segregation is moving ahead from measures of residential segregation based on census data to consider how people with migrant background interact with the receiving society also through work, education and leisure activities (Wong and Shaw, 2011; van Ham and Tammaru, 2016).

One important dimension of segregation relates to the level of exposure between the migrant and the host population. This exposure which allows confrontation between different culture and opinions can be seen as an essential condition to maintain democratic participation process and avoid polarisation and radicalism. Sunstein (2017) points out how virtual communities emerging in social media are increasingly characterised by phenomena of self-insulation. Social media like Facebook and Twitter have the undisputed merit of greatly enhancing the possibilities to access information and communicate with person all over the globe, and in this sense they are contributing to improve exposure to diverse opinions and to connect with others, overcoming the limits of the geographical proximity. However, social media have an explicit objective of tailoring the provision of information on an individual basis and are designed to favour the formation of communities of like-minded. This filtering of information and contacts results in a self-insulation from those who don’t share the same interest and set of values. In this way social media create echo chambers in which the more extreme ideas are amplified, public opinion is polarised.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.