You Don't Have to Live Next to Me: A Critical Review of the Schelling Model and Its Reception

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Work in progress by Anastassia Vybornova & Gülşah Akçakır

Timeline

1937: Redlining map of St. Louis published by the HOLC (Home Owners' Loan Corporation).

1969: The Schelling model is first introduced in Thomas C. Schelling's article "Models of Segregation".

1972: Televised demolition of Pruitt-Igoe, a a housing project in St. Louis that became symbolic for the "failure of federal housing" in the US.

1991: Following debates about the role of individual preferences in the creation of segregated neighbourhoods, W.A.V. Clark attempts to empirically test the Schelling model by means of telephone surveys.

2012: In their article "Dynamic Models of Residential Segregation", Grauwin et al. provide an analytic solution of the Schelling model. With the rise of Complexity Science since the 2000s, the Schelling model is receiving increased attention, but the decisive role of individual preferences and free choice remains unquestioned.

2018: The article "A Schelling Model with Immigration Dynamics" by Urselmans et al. is an (unvoluntary) example of how the Schelling model can be used to steer attention away from systemic causes of segregation.

2022: Nowadays, the Schelling model is still widely used in education - for example, in the online course "Agent-Based Modeling", compiled by the Santa Fe Institute, where the focus is once again on the fact that no large racist bias was theoretically needed to create racial segregation in the US. We suggest that it might be more relevant to ask whether a large racist bias was at work (spoiler alert: yes).

2023: For this work in progress that wants to critically review the Schelling model and its reception, we ask ourselves:

How do marginalization and freedom of choice intersect, and what are the real-world intricacies of models that do not account for this intersection?

References

99% Invisible (2012). The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (No. 44). Retrieved 9 July 2023, from https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-44-the-pruitt-igoe-myth/

Clark, W. A. V. (1991). Residential preferences and neighborhood racial segregation: A test of the schelling segregation model. Demography, 28(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/2061333

Grauwin, S., Goffette-Nagot, F., & Jensen, P. (2012). Dynamic models of residential segregation: An analytical solution. Journal of Public Economics, 96(1–2), 124–141. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2011.08.011

Nelson, R. K., Winling, L., Marciano, R., & Connolly, N. (2023). Mapping Inequality. American Panorama, Ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/

Santa Fe Institute (2022). Agent-Based Modeling: Schelling's Tipping Model. Complexity Explorer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Hu-50BNVBc&list=PLF0b3ThojznRKYcrw8moYMUUJK2Ra8Hwl&index=15&ab_channel=ComplexityExplorer

Schelling, T. C. (1969). Models of Segregation. The American Economic Review, 59(2), 488–494.

Urselmans, L. (2018). A Schelling Model with Immigration Dynamics. In P. R. Lewis, C. J. Headleand, S. Battle, & P. D. Ritsos (Eds.), Artificial Life and Intelligent Agents (pp. 3–15). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90418-4_1