News
Future presentations
2 September 2026: From here to there: investigating the effects of residential relocation trade-offs on urban economic segregation, Royal Geographical Society Annual Meeting, London, UK.
11 September 2026: Synthetic populations, synthetic cities and the spatio-temporal effects of urban inequality and segregation, Behave summer school on agend-based modelling, Brescia, Italy.
9-13 November 2026: Workshop: Updating urban segregation computation with R in Delft, NL. More info: erc-segue.nl/Workshop
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
July 2026 (San Millán et al., 2026): This article addresses the social housing mediation between economic inequality and income-based urban segregation. It focuses on the Netherlands, where residential access to social housing is partially insulated from market mechanisms and shaped instead by institutional allocation rules. Using longitudinal microdata for all Dutch municipalities between 2011 and 2024, we examine how the size, spatial distribution and socio-economic composition of the social housing sector condition urban segregation patterns. Our results show that social housing can substantially reduce segregation when it is broadly accessible across income groups and spatially integrated within cities. By contrast, when social housing is both geographically concentrated and socially residualized, segregation is significantly higher. Under the most favourable social-housing configurations, predicted segregation levels are one third lower than under the least favourable ones, even at identical levels of economic inequality.
June 2026 (Cottineau-Mugadza, 2026a): This chapter follows the text of Charlotte Lagrange’s play “Quand la ville se lève” in the Art and Science collection “Pourparlers”. For this piece, I was invited to reflect on the mechanisms and scales of gentrification, from a scientific point of view complementary to the artistic take with which the playwright approached them, and for a braod audience.
May 2026 (Janssen et al., 2026): In this article, we address the effects of gentrification on residential mobility, with a particular attention given to the diverse socio-spatial trajectories of individuals moving into or out of gentrifying neighborhoods. We employ a multi-channel sequence analysis to track the movement trajectories of individuals within the Rotterdam region, focusing specifically on those who relocated to or from neighborhoods identified as gentrifying by policymakers, examining how these trajectories intersect with other life-course characteristics of individuals. Our findings showcase that residential mobility in gentrifying neighborhoods does not follow a straightforward vacancy chain of low-income households moving out and gentrifiers moving in. Instead, gentrifiers increasingly move within these neighborhoods, gradually limiting the housing opportunities of low-income individuals.
January 2026 (Cottineau-Mugadza, 2026b): This is a review of the book “Rethinking Spatial Inequality”, by Linda M. Lobao and Gregory Hooks.