Immigrant Activity-Space Segregation: Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Assimilation and Separation in Barcelona

ended

This project will deepen society’s understanding of immigration while enabling a young, experienced researcher to acquire new skills by collaborating with a well-established European research group with a long record of high quality academic output. The project will help illuminate the lives of immigrants in Barcelona, focusing on their use of space and time as a way to understand the process of assimilation and barriers to social and economic inclusion. Drawing on the expertise of UPF’s Interdisciplinary Research Group on Immigration (GRITIM-UPF), the researcher (John Palmer) will interview and observe a panel of immigrants over time to learn about their routines and about the places and people with which they come into contact as they go about their daily activities. The researcher will use newly-developed mobile phone geolocation methods to quantify systematic differences in the spatio-temporal distributions of immigrants and natives, while using traditional qualitative approaches to analyse the social significance of these segregation patterns.