Activity-Space Segregation: Understanding Social Divisions in Space and Time

John Palmer, Princeton University

This paper presents a new theoretical and methodological framework for understanding racial and ethnic segregation in cities. My approach incorporates time into traditional, static measures of residential segregation in order to capture socially significant patterns in the spaces people use throughout the day. Drawing on Torsten Hägerstrand's concept of time-space prisms, I propose a set of "activity-space segregation indexes" that measure evenness, exposure, concentration, and clustering in three dimensional time-space units. I also propose a set of modifications to these measures that may be used to augment the basic indexes and better address questions of social interaction, environmental exposure, and movement.