IASS · Immigrant Activity-Space Segregation: Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Assimilation and Separation in Barcelona
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2016-01-01 → 2017-12-31
- EU contribution
- €170,122
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
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Results in brief
Immigrant Activity-Space Segregation: Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Assimilation and Separation in Barcelona
The main focus on the project has been on better understanding immigration and activity-space segregation -- social segregation in space and time. Activity-space segregation is of great concern because it drives inequality by creating stark differences in people’s access to resources and exposure to hazards. This project has resulted in a set of protocols and tools that make it possible to quantify and better understand activity-space segregation at the scale of the city. These will be put into effect to collect data in Barcelona as soon as the social and political situation permits. The project has also resulted in important advances in our ability to measure and understand one of the key hazards that drive poverty as a result of activity-space segregation: exposure to disease-vector mosquitoes. This problem of disease-vector mosquitoes has been growing during the past two decades but it took on new urgency at the end of 2015 with outbreaks of Zika triggering a global health emergency. This emergency led the researcher to advance work he had begun previously using citizen science to track the spread of disease-vector mosquitoes in Spain. As a result, he was able to show, in an article published in Nature Communications, that citizen science offers a reliable and scalable tool that is well-positioned to revolutionize the surveillance of dangerous mosquitoes worldwide. Moreover, he was able to obtain estimates of the tiger mosquito distribution across Spain at sufficiently small spatial and temporal scales to link the risk of mosquito-borne disease with human mobility and social inequality. This has helped spark the formation of a Global Mosquito Alert initiative, of which the researcher is a founding member, in collaboration with the UN Environmental Program, the World Health Organization, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and citizen science associations around the world.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
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.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSIDAD POMPEU FABRA · BarcelonaCoordinatorSpain
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union