Finding the Fault Lines: Estimating the Boundaries in Urban Social-Spatial Inquiry

Segregation, sorting, and spatial social division is a common property of many cities. It emerges in many different urban systems and polarizes along different social axes throughout history. Integral to many theories of urban conflict in sociology and market formation in urban economics, understanding where and how social dividing lines develop is important to understand and explain urban social structure. Recently-developed information-theoretic methods can help provide better understanding of the spatial and social distribution dynamics underlying urban social change. This talk will discuss some of these methods, demonstrate their application to segregation and economic sorting in high-quality longitudinal demographic data.

Levi Wolf is a Senior Lecturer based at the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom. He also is a Fellow at the University of Chicago Center for Spatial Data Science, a Fellow with the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science & AI in London, and is an Affiliate Faculty at the University of California, Riverside. Dr. Wolf completed his PhD on gerrymandering at Arizona State University in 2017 with Profs. Sergio Rey, Luc Anselin, Stewart Fotheringham, and Wendy Tam Cho. Currently, he works on developing new data scientific and Bayesian statistical methods to improve our understanding of boundaries and bounding in urban social fabric, engaging with political problems (studying the emergence and geographical structure of gerrymandering), social questions (examining barriers to movement, settlement, and social ties in neighborhood formation), and economic issues (understanding cluster development policy and regional urban economic planning). In the past, Dr. Wolf has worked in industry as a geographic data scientist, and leads and contributes to many open source geographic data science projects in Python.

LiPS is free and open to all. Refreshments will be provided.