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.
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
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.
December 2025 (Cottineau-Mugadza et al., 2026): In this article, we model the social effect of urban segregation ‘around the clock’ on health behaviours (such as the choice of a healthy diet). We do so using an empirical agent-based model initialised on the Paris region with a synthetic population and a combination of scenarios of residential patterns (random allocation vs. census-based allocation reflecting the empirical level of residential segregation) with scenarios of daily mobility (no daily moves, random moves or survey-based daily moves reflecting the empirical level of daytime segregation in Paris). We find an increase in the uptake of healthy behaviours in all scenarios, but contrasted results with respect to social inequalities.