Federico BENASSI, Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat), Italy
Maria CARELLA, University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, Italy
Ricardo IGLESIAS-PASCUAL, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Spain
The neoliberal economic model has been characterised by an increasing mobility of capital, people, and the rising of social inequality (Piketty, 2020). In the cities, one of the main features of this flexible model is the growing process of deregulation of the residential market (Rodríguez-Pose & Storper, 2020), which has been embodied in a divided city model (OECD, 2018). Urban spaces become therefore a privileged spatial and social scenario of the structural contradictions of the neoliberal model. In the specific case of Spain, the main reports that analyse the situation of inequality and social vulnerability (EAPN, 2021) show how the situation of social crisis that began in 2008, not only has not been overcome, but with COVID-19 it has been accentuated, generating a significant increase in the population at risk of poverty. This increase of social vulnerability has been reflected since 2011 in Spanish cities in the emergence of strong processes of social polarization (Rubiales, 2020). On the base of this background, our study aims to verify how the composition of the foreign population changed in the neighborhoods of Madrid and Barcelona over the period 2001-2021. For this end, we will gather the neighborhoods according to some variables related to human capital and wealth to cover different combinations of socioeconomic differences. A systematic comparison among the local spatial clusters used to pursue our objective will allow us to investigate on the nationalities that have been predominant over time in the high-income and in lower-income neighborhoods. The diachronic analysis developed show how the ethnic evolution since the beginning of the first migratory flows in 2001, the great recession and the impact of the COVID crisis. The results show how the country of origin is key to understanding the socio-economic level of the territorial areas where the foreign-born population resides, indirectly reinforcing the model of a divided and socially dualised city.
Mots clés : Left behind areas|city|foreign-born population |social inequalities|Spain
A104213RI