News
Current projects
ERC Starting Grant SEGUE: modelling urban economic segregation in cities of the Netherlands. This project combines systematic literature reviews, longitudinal analysis of empirical microdata and generative agent-based modelling to address the evolution and causal relationships between economic segregation and economic inequality in cities.
Rbanism: empowering urbanism researchers, students, educators and practitioners to use open-source software and related open-science practices effectively and with confidence. This community project raises awareness, stimulates engagement and builds capacity by demonstrating the benefits of reproducibility, automation and scalability for urbanism research, education and practice.
Recent publications
October 2025 (San Millán, Cottineau-Mugadza, et al., 2025): In this article, we explore how the spatiotemporal patterns of affluence and poverty differ when considering wealth versus income. By analyzing geo-coded microdata from the Netherlands, we show that wealth segregation is much higher than income segregation; that financial wealth is more unequally distributed than real estate wealth across society, but is more equally distributed across space; that wealth segregation is more sensitive to the spatial scale of measurement than income segregation; that income segregation is decreasing in most urban areas whereas wealth segregation is rising almost everywhere in the Netherlands.
September 2025 (Cottineau & Pumain, 2025): In this entry, Denise Pumain and I propose a definition of urban inequality. We also present the history of the concept, its central relevance for geography, regional science and urban policy.
June 2025 (Cottineau-Mugadza, 2025): In this chapter, I present an overview of patterns and regularities in city size distributions. Starting from a short history of early findings, I go on to present Zipf’s contribution, the plethora of empirical material which can be interpreted as a confirmation of the law and some models generating such a regular distribution. The deviations from the law and recent propositions to advance the study of urbanisation “beyond Zipf’s law” are also presented.
May 2025 (San Millán, Cottineau‐Mugadza, et al., 2025): In this paper, we compute income inequality and residential segregation annually in all urban areas of the Netherlands from 2011 to 2022 and show they have remained stable or decreased in most cities. We analyse how income is distributed by percentile of the income distribution, how each percentile is segregated and at which geographical scale segregation occurs in different cities. Urban areas vary strongly: more unequal urban areas tend to be more segregated, but the same segregation levels can coexist with diverse inequality metrics.